It's not an alternative to volume rendering as the title suggests. It's a kind of a brand name the manufacturer wants to establish for their admittedly very impressive volume rendering implementation
It seems like these guys added lighting to the visualization of CT volumes and decided to call it "Cinematic Rendering" or "CR" for short.<p>I'm not sure what possessed these people to take 40 year old techniques and decide that they could come up with a hyperbolic name and a new acronym then not have everyone just roll their eyes.
Are there any physicians on here that find these renders useful? As a radiology resident, I often prefer reading from the source images, as the whole point is to see inside a patient, rather than provide some partial surface rendering.<p>Non-radiologists seem to love these sorts of images, but I don't think they are all that helpful.
This is very interesting, the amount of rendering complexity they pull from volume data is nothing short of impressive. Having never ventured beyond Orthogonal projections for pseudo 3D in my work, this is some fresh air.
But it's rather useless as a standalone technology. Much of the appeal comes from pulling color and using it to render from segmented volume data, which is rarely the case in the field.
"Scattering effects are modelled using a local gradient shading model"
This can mess with perception, if done incorrectly, especially where precision is spares like Volumetric data pulled from Ultrasound, not to mention such a rendering model in non segmented data sets is questionable.
But one hell of a tool to convince a board meeting of whatever.