Case study: visualization of laser confocal microscopy datasets

The paper presents an example of how existing visualization methods can be successfully applied-after minor modifications-for allowing new, sometimes unexpected insight into scientific questions, in this case for better understanding of unknown, microscopic biological structures. The authors present a volume rendering system supporting the visualization of LCM datasets, a new microscopic tomographic method allowing for the first time accurate and fast in-vivo inspection of the spatial structure of microscopic structures, especially important in (but not restricted to) biology. The speed, flexibility and versatility of the system allows fast, convenient, interactive operation with large datasets on small computers (workstation or PC). By testing different datasets, they have been able to significantly improve the performance of understanding the internal structure of LCM data. Most important, they have been able to show static and dynamic structures of cells never seen before and allowing significant insight in the cell movement process. Therefore they regard the system as a universal tool for the visualization of such data.