Medical & Scientific Visualization

Over the past decade, visualization of medical and scientific data has become more accessible with improvements in information technology. Scientific visualization is the process of transforming quantitative data into meaningful sensory information for the purpose of analyzing the data. We can take advantage of the human brain's ability to process a vast amount of sensory information very rapidly, by mapping these sensory characteristics to data.

Moreover, various disciplines can be studied only with the aid of visualization techniques. From interactive 3D to large-format print to DVD-quality animation, Illume Arts can provide the needed tools and experience to bring your ideas to light.

The process of scientific visualization, as set up in our main pipeline, can be summarized as:

1. data generation (the client's data)
2. data preparation
3. previsualization
4. rendering
5. displaying

As is often the case, the wide variety of formats for images and data often compound the problem of visualization. Our software development team is available to help p rocess your images and/or data and validate the conversion process to ensure that no errors were introduced.

Examples:

Macromolecular Pipeline: Advanced shader design for macromolecular visualization. Macromolecular visualization is currently opening up as the efforts of the Human Genome Project are being translated to the Structural Genomics worldwide effort. We have developed a rapid "image-prototyping" pipeline for structural biology. The initial stages of the rendering sub-pipeline allow the client to best choose the style, orientation, scale and other parameters. Later stages include choosing the final look, which is defined by (1) lighting and (2) shading. In this example, we have represented the macromolecule bacteriorhodopsin has having metallic surfacing inside a simplified Cornell box.

Medical Illustration Pipeline: Biomedical concepts and science are often too complex to measure experimentally. In such cases, ideas need to be translated into imagery by way of communication between the client and technical illustrator/artist. In this case, a view of icosahedral virus particles, modeled and rendered in 3D (with expandability for animation), was composited against capillary walls. The desired effect was "barbarians at the gate" and the virus were composited and shaded to reflect this.