Visualization of heart from cryosection image based on a hybrid transfer function

Visualizing segmented heart and integral chest clearly and precisely would be beneficial for pathology research, presurgical planning and clinical approach. In this paper we investigated the visualization of the segmented heart obtained by cryosection images from Visible Human Project. In addition, the result also visualizes the integral chest to represent the spatial characteristics of the heart in the chest. To provide a satisfactory visualization quality on the shape and boundary of heart, we first extract cardiac data from cryosection data. In volume rendering process, we design a new transfer function combining occlusion spectrum with gradient information to highlight heart without lost of chest data. By implementation of some popular transfer functions, comparison with these results shows that this hybrid transfer function we proposed visualizes cardiac outline and internal structures clearly. Through the display of chest, users can also observe heart´s location characteristics.