Confocal Image Visualization

Confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) has become widely established as a research intrument especially in the field of biology and medicine. The popularity of CLSM comes from that it is a powerful imaging apparatus which provides high resolution images and gives researchers the capacity to delve into the internal mechanisms of living cells even deeper in 3D and in 4D (space and time).In this paper, both the techniques of confocal microscopy and computer visualization are employed to establish a way of visualizing the volume data obtained by confocal microscopy. Related techniques include cell culturing and dyeing, confocal microscopy parameters optimizing, confocal data preprocessing, normal estimation, 3D data reconstrcution algorithms and interactive methods are discussed detailedly. A normal estimation algorithm for visualization is presented in this paper. It approximates the density function in local neighborhood with a second-degree polynomial function. It is demonstrated that this method is a fairly robust technique compared with other methods. Various visualization methods are employed in this paper. Surface rendering methods are used to represent the surface structure of the neuron, direct volume rendering algorithms provide a way of visualize intracellular substance distribution, a compositing rendering technique is developed to show the activity of intracellular substance. Based on the way provided in this paper, we investigate the distribution and dynamics of calcium and nitric oxide in the neuron.