Hinging on approaches from the fields of clinical imaging and information technology assessment in medicine, a validation scheme is presented for 3-D biomedical image interpretation. This scheme considers measurement of algorithmic accuracy and evaluation of clinical functionality and usefulness. The former component is meant to characterize the intrinsic quality of a method, the latter to assess how well a method serves its clininal goals. Four examples from our own research are used to illustrate this scheme. We report on the validation of (1) a semi-automatic method to quantify myocardial perfusion on SPECT images, (2) bone segmentation accuracy on spiral CT images, (3) a workstation for stereotactic neurosurgery, and, (4) stereolithographic models.