Improved visualization of fiber tracts in whole brain using illuminated line rendering

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) tractography is a unique way to reconstruct the neural fiber tracts from in vivo data and thereby quantify the microstructures of cerebral white matter. Most visualization methods display fibers using thin tubes or threads without illumination, which has obscurely spatial perception. We propose a novel rendering approach based on illuminated lines to visualize the whole brain fiber tracts. The line lighting models employed in this work are based on maximum reflection principle and the cylinder averaging, simulating the depth of field in an environment with multi-light sources. Moreover, we adopted a knowledge based lookup table for accelerated rendering using the graphics processing unit (GPU). Experiment results demonstrated that our algorithm generated visually good intuitive 3D effect in displaying the fiber tracts, with significantly accelerated speed in rendering the whole set of fiber tracts in the brain on a PC-based workstation. The results indicated that our algorithm is suitable for exploring large volumes of data and suitable for visualization of intricate fibers in the brain.