The RenderList-based algorithm for surface display has been designed
for providing real-time frame rates for viewing medical data within a
Java-based diagnostic application. By using purely software-based
rendering, the algorithm achieves similar performance on different
hardware platforms. By exploiting the advantages of explicit surface
extraction and shear/warp projection, high frame rates are
achieved at low memory cost. The only non-interactive step of the
visualization process is the extraction of surface voxels during
the preprocessing step (1-2 seconds for a typical 
data
set). Surface extraction has to be repeated each time a new iso-value
is specified.
Compared with a polygonal representation of the boundary surfaces, this approach preserves the full accuracy of the data set at much lower memory cost, and allows interactive rendering on low-end hardware.