A Pentium personal computer-based craniofacial three-dimensional imaging and analysis system

Personal computer (PC)-based computing is now ubiquitous in common consumer: applications. Although PCs have equaled or surpassed engineering workstations in basic computing power and economy, there is still strong workstation dependency for imaging applications. This article demonstrates that a complete system, based on a Pentium PC (Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA) and readily available and inexpensive software, can be built very economically for effective execution of most of the commonly used three-dimensional imaging operations. For the craniofacial application, the Pentium system offers a twofold speed advantage over a Spare 20 system using similar three-dimensional processing software. The Pentium system allows interactive fuzzy volume rendering, and manipulation and analysis of complex hard and soft-tissue structures.