As an advancement of imaging modalities, the use of 3-D volume data have been steadily in-creased. Reading and diagnosis of 2D tomographic images from the volume data require more efforts and time than before. This leads to develop 3-D image
reconstruction and volume visualization tech-niques in conjunction with increasing PACS installation. However, the clinical usefulness of 3-D re-constructed images in cardiovascular system has not been throughly investigated. We retrieved DI-COM
CT images from mini-PACS server. Then, 3-D volume images were reconstructed from 2D im-ages using V-worksTM 3.5(Cybermed Inc. Korea) which is a PC based image processing program. The radiologists evaluated for clinical usefulness and the diagnostic
efficiencies for the 3-D recon-structed images. In the diagnosis of cardiovascular case, 3-D reconstructed image plays an important role. The difference of image contrast was relatively high and 3-D images offered more information than 2D images for anatomical structures. A special 3-D module or a modeling device for PACS will be an essential demand for effective diagnosis and research for volume data. The results are limited to the case of cardiovascular images. Further studies for more accurate segmentation, better image processing technology, and their demonstration for other applications will be required to generalize the usefulness of 3-D imaging technologies.