Medical imaging modalities generate increasingly more and very large three-dimensional data sets. According to an exemplary embodiment of the present invention, a three-dimensional data set of an object of interest is interactively visualized with a varying sampling rate in an image. Advantageously, a focus area may be moved by a user interactively during rendering, wherein the sampling rate of a particular part of the image is defined by its relative position to the focus area. Advantageously, this may allow for an improvement of an overall rendering performance.