High-Quality Analytic Isosurface Rendering for Web-Based Cardiac Imaging

Advancements in GPU-accelerated web-based 3D rendering have enabled high-quality, interactive medical visualization directly within standard browsers, eliminating the need for native software installations. Building on this progress, we present a fully browser-native isosurface renderer designed for volumetric medical datasets. The system supports both trilinear and tricubic interpolation, enabling sub-voxel accurate surface reconstruction through analytic root-finding techniques. To improve rendering efficiency, we extend empty-space skipping strategies to accommodate tricubic interpolation. Additionally, we introduce a novel early rejection test based on Bernstein polynomials, which efficiently identifies and excludes regions devoid of isosurface intersections-yielding up to 1.5 × speedups, especially in the computationally intensive tricubic case. While each component exists in native graphics pipelines, their integration into a browser-based framework bridges the gap between desktop-level performance and installation-free access. We validate our approach using contrast-enhanced cardiac CT volumes, achieving interactive frame rates ranging from 25 to 45 frames per second (FPS). on consumer-grade hardware. In a targeted usability study, 7 out of 8 clinicians reported that the system improved their ability to visualize patient data and communicate medical findings.