I believe this is called "FUTON bias" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUTON_bias).
It could load, slice, and iso-surface up to about a gig of data with only 128meg of ram. I provided C++ source to write the file format.
"Robust invisible watermarking of volume data using 3D DCT", doi:10.1109/CGI.2001.934699 , https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3904386_Robust_invi...