Title :
HOT-lines: tracking lines in higher order tensor fields
Author :
Hlawitschka, Mario ; Scheuermann, Gerik
Author_Institution :
Inst. for Comput. Sci., Leipzig Univ., Germany
Abstract :
Tensors occur in many areas of science and engineering. Especially, they are used to describe charge, mass and energy transport (i.e. electrical conductivity tensor, diffusion tensor, thermal conduction tensor resp.) If the locale transport pattern is complicated, usual second order tensor representation is not sufficient. So far, there are no appropriate visualization methods for this case. We point out similarities of symmetric higher order tensors and spherical harmonics. A spherical harmonic representation is used to improve tensor glyphs. This paper unites the definition of streamlines and tensor lines and generalizes tensor lines to those applications where second order tensors representations fail. The algorithm is tested on the tractography problem in diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI) and improved for this special application.
Keywords :
data visualisation; magnetic resonance imaging; medical image processing; tensors; tracking; HOT-lines tracking; diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging; higher order tensor fields; spherical harmonic representation; tractography problem; visualization method; Biomedical imaging; Data visualization; Diffusion tensor imaging; Displays; Function approximation; Humans; Power engineering and energy; Streaming media; Tensile stress; Thermal conductivity;
Conference_Titel :
Visualization, 2005. VIS 05. IEEE
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-9462-3
DOI :
10.1109/VISUAL.2005.1532773