Science at the Speed of Thought - Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery - page 15

techniques. The data is produced by OCM (Optical Coherence Microscopy) and
CFM (Confocal Fluorescence Microscopy) techniques being developed at NIST.
These data are being used to investigate structural and functional properties
of tissue engineering scaffolds. The scaffolds are porous polymers that act as
support structures for the growth of cells. Our visualization techniques are being
used in an effort to characterize properties such as mechanical performance and
induction of tissue development.
The data are produced at differing scales and data from different instruments
show different structures. Our task is to combine these data sets into coherent
immersive visualizations. Challenges include registration, segmentation, and ex-
posure of volume structures. We use several important visual and geometric
representations of the data, including derived surfaces, two-dimensional slices,
and three-dimensional volume renderings. In all cases, we visualize the data in
a three-dimensional space that is analogous to the physical dimensions of the
a.
b.
Fig. 10. An immersive visualization of the Iris data set. Image a shows one of the
rooms of the multiple-view visualization shown in image b .