Applications
Implicit max-k-d trees are used for ray casting isosurfaces/MIP (maximum intensity projection). The attribute assigned to each inner node is the maximal scalar value given in the subgrid belonging to the node. Nodes are not traversed if their scalar values are smaller than the searched iso-value/current maximum intensity along the ray. The low storage requirements of the implicit max kd-tree and the favorable visualization complexity of ray casting allow to ray cast (and even change the isosurface for) very large scalar fields at interactive framerates on commodity PCs. Similarly an implicit min/max kd-tree may be used to efficiently evaluate queries such as terrain line of sight.
Read more about this topic: Implicit K-d Tree