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 Sparc 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.