For the last two decades, Volume Rendering has been a very popular research topic with a wide range of publications and conferences dedicated to it. Initially, these efforts were mostly focused on computer graphics techniques and speed improvements; however, during the last few years there has been an increasing interest in application driven papers. This suggests a change of focus to volume rendering as being a largely application driven research area. One of the most popular application areas is medical imaging - medical scanners usually provide data along rectilinear grids, are ubiquitous within the health care system and provide high resolution volumetric datasets of human anatomy,. Numerous researchers within the visualization community have published application research within this application area. The objective of this panel is to reflect on the advances that volume rendering has brought to the medical community and, even more important, to discuss its current short-comings and future needs. This direct feedback from the medical community will hopefully inspire the IEEE Visualization audience and help to focus on new research areas that will further advance the state of the art in medical visualization.