Visualization of volume data in confocal microscopy: comparison and improvements of volume rendering methods

Abstract

Confocal microscopes routinely produce three‐dimensional data sets. The visualization of these digital volumes is currently performed by one surface rendering or volume rendering approach. In this paper, we describe improvements developed in the field of volume rendering. We focused on three methods: parallelepiped face mapping: the rotation‐projection method (with or without stereoscopy, with different matters and transparencies); the voxel ray‐tracing method. We compared the possibilities of these different algorithms, in terms of quality of rendering, of computation load and as an essential aid to study the 3D organization of biological specimens.