Computerized systems and methods provide occlusion culling for efficiently rendering a three dimensional image. The systems and methods calculate a set of occluder shields in a voxel dataset using a transparency value associated with each voxel of the dataset. Next, the occluder shields are applied to the dataset to identify regions of the voxel data that do not contribute to the final image. Finally, the voxel data set can be rendered, excluding regions that do not contribute to the final image.