Globe Browsing: Contextualized Spatio-Temporal Planetary Surface Visualization.

Results of planetary mapping are often shared openly for use in scientific research and mission planning. In its raw format, however, the data is not accessible to non-experts due to the difficulty in grasping the context and the intricate acquisition process. We present work on tailoring and integration of multiple data processing and visualization methods to interactively contextualize geospatial surface data of celestial bodies for use in science communication.

State-of-the-art of visualization in post-mortem imaging.

Autopsies constitute a valuable feedback to the healthcare chain to achieve improvements in quality of care and cost effectiveness. This review describes post-mortem imaging, which has emerged as an important part of the pathology toolbox. A broad range of visualization aspects within post-mortem imaging are covered.

Efficient visibility encoding for dynamic illumination in direct volume rendering.

We present an algorithm that enables real-time dynamic shading in direct volume rendering using general lighting, including directional lights, point lights, and environment maps. Real-time performance is achieved by encoding local and global volumetric visibility using spherical harmonic (SH) basis functions stored in an efficient multiresolution grid over the extent of the volume. Our method enables high-frequency shadows in the spatial domain, but is limited to a low-frequency approximation of visibility and illumination in the angular domain.

Spatial conditioning of transfer functions using local material distributions.

In many applications of Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) the importance of a certain material or feature is highly dependent on its relative spatial location. For instance, in the medical diagnostic procedure, the patient's symptoms often lead to specification of features, tissues and organs of particular interest. One such example is pockets of gas which, if found inside the body at abnormal locations, are a crucial part of a diagnostic visualization.

Advancing the state-of-the-art for Virtual Autopsies--initial forensic workflow study.

There are numerous advantages described of how imaging technology can support forensic examinations. However, postmortem examinations of bodies are mainly performed to address demands which differ from those of traditional clinical image processing. This needs to be kept in mind when gathering information from image data sets for forensic purposes.

Local ambient occlusion in direct volume rendering.

This paper presents a novel technique to efficiently compute illumination for Direct Volume Rendering using a local approximation of ambient occlusion to integrate the intensity of incident light for each voxel. An advantage with this local approach is that fully shadowed regions are avoided, a desirable feature in many applications of volume rendering such as medical visualization. Additional transfer function interactions are also presented, for instance, to highlight specific structures with luminous tissue effects and create an improved context for semitransparent tissues with a separate absorption control for the illumination settings.

Uncertainty visualization in medical volume rendering using probabilistic animation.

Direct Volume Rendering has proved to be an effective visualization method for medical data sets and has reached wide-spread clinical use. The diagnostic exploration, in essence, corresponds to a tissue classification task, which is often complex and time-consuming. Moreover, a major problem is the lack of information on the uncertainty of the classification, which can have dramatic consequences for the diagnosis.

Full body virtual autopsies using a state-of-the-art volume rendering pipeline.

This paper presents a procedure for virtual autopsies based on interactive 3D visualizations of large scale, high resolution data from CT-scans of human cadavers. The procedure is described using examples from forensic medicine and the added value and future potential of virtual autopsies is shown from a medical and forensic perspective. Based on the technical demands of the procedure state-of-the-art volume rendering techniques are applied and refined to enable real-time, full body virtual autopsies involving gigabyte sized data on standard GPUs.

Local histograms for design of transfer functions in direct volume rendering.

Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) is of increasing diagnostic value in the analysis of data sets captured using the latest medical imaging modalities. The deployment of DVR in everyday clinical work, however, has so far been limited. One contributing factor is that current Transfer Function (TF) models can encode only a small fraction of the user's domain knowledge.