Skip to content
besnik edited this page May 7, 2012 · 35 revisions

Visualization of Volume Data from Confocal Microscopy

Visualization of Volume Data from Confocal Microscopy

Slavomir Hudak

2006

Master's Thesis

Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia

Abstract

This thesis provides a presentation of a parallel volume data visualization system for data supplied from confocal laser scanning microscopy. It describes and compares various methods for volume visualization and optimalization and their implementations on parallel architectures. The parallel volume renderer we have developed is implemented on a 16 nodes PC cluster connected by a high-speed Myrinet network using MPI, ray-casting and binary-swap algorithm. To improve efficiency, several optimalizations for increasing the speed of the ray casting process are used, including empty regions skipping and an efficient bricking addressing scheme. We also suggest several methods of improving the performance when using MPI and compilers. The system is capable of running interactively (several frames per second) on a PC cluster.

Keywords: Volume ray-casting, ray-tracing, parallel rendering, PC clusters, binary swap algorithm, volume data.

Abbreviations

Name Description
BTF Back-To-Front
CLSM Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy
CPU Central Processing Unit
CT Computed Tomography
FTB Front-To-Back
GNU GNU’s Not Unix (Free Software Fundation)
GPL General Public Licence
GPU Graphics Processor Unit
HPC High Performance Clusters
IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
ILC International Laser Centre
ISO International Standards Organization
I/O Input/Output
LAN Local Area Network
LSM Laser Confocal Microscopy
MIMD Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data
MISD Multiple Instruction, Single Data
ILC International Laser Centre
MPI Message Passing Interface
MRI Magnetic Resonance Imaging
NUMA Non-Uniform Memory Access
RADC Ray Acceleration by Distance Coding
PGI The Portland Group, Inc.
PSF Point Spread Function
SIMD Single Instruction, Multiple Data
SISD Single Instruction, Single Data
SMP Symmetrical Multi Processing
SPMD Single Program, Multiple data
SSE Streaming SIMD Extensions
SSH Secure Shell
TIFF Tagged Image File Format
Clone this wiki locally