Case study: Visualization of laser confocal microscopy datasets

This paper presents an example of how existing visualization methods can be successfully applied - after minor modifications - for allowing new, sometimes unexpected insight in scientific questions, in this case for better understanding unknown, microscopic biological structures. We present a volume rendering system supporting the visualization of LCM datasets, a new microscopic tomographics 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, interactiveoperation with large datasets on small computers (workstation of PC). By testing different datasets we have been able to significantly improve the performance of understanding the internal structure of LCM data. Most important, we have been able to show static and dynamic structures of cells never seen before and allowing significant insight in the cell movement process. Therefore we regard our system as a universal tool for the visualization such data