Illustrative visualization of segmented human cardiac anatomy based on context-preserving model

The layered structure of human heart is a challenging task for visualization. Conventional visualization method can hardly be used to provide satisfied rendering results due to the complex anatomical structure of human heart. In addition, it is very hard to find a balance between rendering the inner structure and the silhouettes of the heart. In this work we adopt the context-preserving volume rendering model which has been widely applied to layered medical data sets. We add new ingredient to the context-preserving model to fit the human heart volume data set and design an interactive tuning transfer function to enhance the tissue silhouettes. A transfer function is designed to map the gray scale in 3D cardiac data to the corresponding optical attribute according to the anatomical structure. To enhance rendering efficiency, we implement our method in a Graphic Processing Units (GPU) based framework.