Illustration motifs for effective medical volume illustration

The enormous amount of 3D data generated by modern scientific experiments, simulations, and scanners exacerbates the tasks of effectively exploring, analyzing, and communicating the essential information from these data sets. The expanding field of biomedicine creates data sets that challenge current techniques to effectively communicate information for use in diagnosis, staging, simulation, and training. In contrast, medical illustration succinctly represents essential anatomical structures in a clear way and is used extensively in the medical held for communicative and illustrative purposes. Thus, the idea of rendering real medical data sets using traditional medical illustrative styles inspired work in volume illustration. The main goal of the volume illustration approach is to enhance the expressiveness of volume rendering by highlighting important features within a volume while subjugating insignificant details, and rendering the result in a way that resembles an illustration. Recent approaches have been extended to interactive volume illustration by using PC graphics hardware volume rendering to accelerate the enhanced rendering, resulting in nearly interactive rates.