Exposure Render: An Interactive Photo-Realistic Volume Rendering Framework

The field of volume visualization has undergone rapid development during the past years, both due to advances in suitable computing hardware and due to the increasing availability of large volume datasets. Recent work has focused on increasing the visual realism in Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) by integrating a number of visually plausible but...

High-performance simulations of turbulent clouds on a desktop PC: Exploiting the GPU

Image-based rendering of intersecting surfaces for dynamic comparative visualization

Nested or intersecting surfaces are proven techniques for visualizing shape differences between static 3D objects (Weigle and Taylor II, IEEE Visualization, Proceedings, pp. 503–510, 2005). In this paper we present an image-based formulation for these techniques that extends their use to dynamic scenarios, in which surfaces can be manipulated or...

Articulated Planar Reformation for Change Visualization in Small Animal Imaging

The analysis of multi-timepoint whole-body small animal CT data is greatly complicated by the varying posture of the subject at different timepoints. Due to these variations, correctly relating and comparing corresponding regions of interest is challenging. In addition, occlusion may prevent effective visualization of these regions of interest....

Smooth Graphs for Visual Exploration of Higher-Order State Transitions

In this paper, we present a new visual way of exploring state sequences in large observational time-series. A key advantage of our method is that it can directly visualize higher-order state transitions. A standard first order state transition is a sequence of two states that are linked by a transition. A higher-order state transition is a...

A statistical approach to the life cycle analysis of cumulus clouds selected in a virtual reality environment

In this study, a new method is developed to investigate the entire life cycle of shallow cumuli in large eddy simulations. Although trained observers have no problem in distinguishing the different life stages of a cloud, this process proves difficult to automate, because cloud-splitting and cloud-merging events complicate the distinction...

Extensions of Parallel Coordinates for Interactive Exploration of Large Multi-Timepoint Data Sets

Parallel coordinate plots (PCPs) are commonly used in information visualization to provide insight into multi-variate data. These plots help to spot correlations between variables. PCPs have been successfully applied to unstructured datasets up to a few millions of points. In this paper, we present techniques to enhance the usability of PCPs for...

Efficient seeding and defragmentation of curvature streamlines for colonic polyp detection

Many computer aided diagnosis (CAD) schemes have been developed for colon cancer detection using Virtual Colonoscopy (VC). In earlier work, we developed an automatic polyp detection method integrating flow visualization techniques, that forms part of the CAD functionality of an existing Virtual Colonoscopy pipeline. Curvature streamlines were...

Classifying CT Image Data Into Material Fractions by a Scale and Rotation Invariant Edge Model

A fully automated method is presented to classify 3-D CT data into material fractions. An analytical scale-invariant description relating the data value to derivatives around Gaussian blurred step edges—arch model—is applied to uniquely combine robustness to noise, global signal fluctuations, anisotropic scale, noncubic voxels, and ease of use...

Interactive visualization of fused fMRI and DTI for planning brain tumor resections

The surgical removal of brain tumors can lead to functional impairment. Therefore it is crucial to minimize the damage to important functional areas during surgery. These areas can be mapped before surgery by using functional MRI. However, functional impairment is not only caused by damage to these areas themselves. It is also caused by damage...

Integrated visualization of multi-angle bioluminescence imaging and micro CT

This paper explores new methods to visualize and fuse multi-2D bioluminescence imaging (BLI) data with structural imaging modalities such as micro CT and MR. A geometric, back-projection-based 3D reconstruction for superficial lesions from multi-2D BLI data is presented, enabling a coarse estimate of the 3D source envelopes from the multi-2D BLI...