Medical image interpretation is facing an important challenge resulting from the continuously increasing amount of imaging data. Innovations in medical image visualization are necessary to assist the radiologist in interacting and navigating effectively large multi-dimensional imaging sets. We propose a novel wavelet splatting approach for multiresolution 3D visualization. Our method renders the context with a low resolution at first, and then subsequently refines it progressively to attain full resolution, while ensuring that a specific region of interest is rendered at full resolution at all times. It is based on the splatting approach for its computational efficiency and uses the localization property of the wavelet transform to simultaneously render a full resolution region of interest with a coarser context. Lighting calculations are used in the preprocessing stage to enhance the quality of the visualization. A special data structure that is based on a zero-tree model is used to m...