Interference Microscopy Volume Illustration for Biomedical Data

In this paper, we propose a novel volume illustration technique inspired by interference microscopy, which has been successfully used in biological, medical and material science over decades. Our approach simulates the optical phenomenon in interference microscopy that accounts light interference over transparent specimens, in order to generate contrast enhanced and illustrative volume visualization results. Specifically, we propose PCVR (Phase-Contrast Volume Rendering) and DICVR (Differential Interference Contrast Volume Rendering) corresponding to Phase-Contrast microscopy and Differential Interference Contrast (DIC) microscopy respectively. Without complex transfer function design, our proposed method can enhance the image contrast and structure details according to the subtle change of Optical Path Differences (OPD), and illustrate the thickness change and occluded structures with interferometry metaphors. In addition, we also develop a user interface to enable slicing specimen sections in volume data. Focus+ context lens are also included in the system for convenient data navigation and exploration. As the proposed methods are based upon widely applied microscopy techniques, they are intuitive for domain experts to explore and analyze the volume data with the proposed methods. The feedbacks from domain users suggest our proposed techniques are useful volume visualization approaches complimentary to the traditional ones.