An Evaluation of Peak Finding for DVR Classification of Biological Data

In medicine and the life sciences, volume data are frequently entropic, containing numerous features at different scales as well as significant noise from the scan source. Conventional transfer function approaches for direct volume rendering have difficulty handling such data, resulting in poor classification or undersampled rendering. Peak finding addresses issues in classifying noisy data by explicitly solving for isosurfaces at desired peaks in a transfer function. As a result, one can achieve better classification and visualization with fewer samples and correspondingly higher performance. This paper applies peak finding to several medical and biological data sets, particularly examining its potential in directly rendering unfiltered and unsegmented data.