Demand-driven volume rendering of terascale EM data

Demand-driven volume rendering of terascale EM data

Johanna Beyer, Markus Hadwiger, Won-Ki Jeong, Hanspeter Pfister, and Jeff Lichtman.

International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, SIGGRAPH 2011, Vancouver, BC, Canada, August 7-11, 2011, Talks Proceedings, 2011.

In neuroscience, a very promising bottom-up approach to under- standing how the brain works is built on acquiring and analyzing electron microscopy (EM) scans of brain tissue, an area known as Connectomics. This results in volume data of extremely high resolution of 3-5nm per pixel and 25-50nm slice thickness, overall lead- ing to data sizes of many terabytes. To support the work of neurobiologists, interactive exploration and analysis of such volumes requires novel visual computing systems because the requirements differ from those of current systems in several key aspects. In this talk, we describe the system that we are working on to enable neuroscientists to interactively roam terascale EM volumes and support their analysis.