CCV Gallery

The Visible Human Project

A few years ago, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) created computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and color cryosection images of a male and female human cadaver in an effort to provide a complete digital atlas of the human body. The "Visible Man" data set consists of axial scans of the entire body taken at 1 mm intervals at a resolution of 512 pixels by 512 pixels, where the whole data set has over 1870 cross-sections (frozon CT: 1877 slices, fresh CT: 1882 slices). The "Visible Woman" data set consists of cross-sectional images taken at one-third the interval of the male. The data sets amount to 15 Gbytes and 40 Gbytes, respectively. These visualizations were created by CCV Associate Researcher Sanhun Park.

Computational Cosmology

Gravitational collapse of initially small-amplitude density fluctuations of "dark matter" is thought to have led to formation of the large-scale structure seen in the universe today. The simulation visualized here is embedded in a cube 64 megaparsecs (209 million light years) on a side at present, and models dark matter and gaseous components. The large structure in the center is a massive central galaxy cluster (the "Santa Barbara Cluster"), which could contain on the order of 1,000 galaxies. The simulations were developed by Paul Shapiro and Hugo Martel of the Galaxy Formation and the Intergalactic Medium Research Group at the University of Texas. The simulations took 700 CPU hours on the Cray SV1 at the Advanced Computing Center for Engineering and Science. The visualization, produced using image rendering software that is being integrated into the Scalable Visualization Toolkits Alpha Project, was done at CCV by Marcelo Alvarez.

Explosions During Galaxy Formation

When density fluctuations collapse gravitationally out of the expanding cosmological background universe to form galaxies, the secondary energy release which results can affect their subsequent evolution profoundly. Focused upon here are the effects of one form of such energy release - explosions, such as might result from the supernovae which end the lives of the first generation of massive stars to form inside protogalaxies. As an idealized model which serves to illustrate and quantify the importance of these effects, the effect of explosions on the quasi-spherical objects which form in the plane of a cosmological pancake, as a result of gravitational instability and fragmentation of the pancake, are studied by numerical gas dynamical simulation in 3D utilizing a new, anisotropic version of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics developed by Paul Shapiro and Hugo Martel of the Galaxy Formation and the Intergalactic Medium Research Group, Adaptive SPH ("ASPH"), coupled to a P3M gravity solver.

Oil Exploration

The movement of water through an oil reservoir is critical to determining the economics of the field. The blue countour shows the advance of water from two injection wells, one in each lobe of a tilted oxbow reservoir, so called for the type of meandering river channel that created the original reservoir sand. The orthogonal slices in the planes of the injection wells are colored according to the local rate of change of water saturation, highlighting the width of the water-oil displacement front. The limits of the reservoir are indicated by the red "curtain." The timing of water arrival at these wells is an important issue in planning oil recovery strategies. This visualization was done in collaboration with the oil reservoir simulations performed on an IBM SP2 supercomputer by the Center of Subsurface Modeling. This research is sponsored in part by the KDI program of the National Science Foundation.

More information about the project can be found here

Turbulent Flow Field

Accelerated Isocontouring Tools developed by CCV allow scientists to quickly create images such as a vorticity isocontour of an axial vortex in a turbulent flow field. Through the helicoidal vortex flow (green), two orthogonal slices,colored with the vorticity intensity (red high, blue low) are shown to enhance the display of vortex evolution in an animation. The turbulent flow is a direct numerical simulation performed on the Intel Paragon supercomputer by Professor Greg Blaisdell's group in aeronautical engineering at Purdue University.

Field Correlation

The interaction energy between a large receptor protein and a small ligand can be computed as the sum of two main contributions: the van Der Waals interaction energy and the electrostatic interaction energy. This graphic shows the correlation between these two scalar fields by displaying isosurfaces of the electrostatic energy colored by the intensity of the van Der Waals interaction. The non-uniform coloring of the surfaces accounts for the different nature of the two energies, one being only distance-based and the other being polar (dependent on the sign of the charges).

Adaptive, Hierarchical Mesh Generation

This smooth reconstruction of a human head shell was built by smoothing and thickening an input triangulation model. Shell structures arise in the design of geometric objects such as aircraft, containers, or the human skull. This research is sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation, Geometric and Symbolic Numerical Computation Program.

Composite Material Segmentation

This is a volumetric dataset provided by the CT scan of an engine. Using the contour spectrum interface we are able to determine the two main isosurfaces that provide the boundaries of the materials that compose the engine. In this picture the two isosurfaces are composed with the entire volumetric dataset combining volume rendering, volume slicing and surface display. This research is sponsored in part by the Sandia National Labs.

Hydraulic Conductivity of the Soil

The surface in these images are an isocontour of the hydraulic conductivity of the soil. The surface is colored according to the concentration of a contaminant (green, low; magenta, high) dissolved in the groundwater, which flow from the left to right. This simultaneous representation of the data readily identifies the primary flow paths for the contaminant through the heterogeneous porous medium. Such information is useful for evaluating the threat of contamination at macroscopic scales and is critical for designing strategies to limit or mitigate the contamination. This visualization was done in collaboration with the simulations performed on an IBM SP2 supercomputer by the Center of Subsurface Modeling. This research is sponsored in part by the Sandia and Larwence Livermore National Labs.

Accelerated Isocontouring

Isocontouring is the extraction of constant valued curves and surfaces from 2d and 3d scalar fields. Display and interactive control of isocontours is helpful in determining the behavior of a scalar field over time. Straight forward isocontouring techniques examine each cell of a mesh to test for intersection with the isocontour of interest. Accelerated isocontouring can be achieved by preprocessing of the data to establish a "seed set" of cells which contains at least one cell from each connected component of each isocontour. From this typically small set of cells, we apply contour propagation to track a contour through cell adjacencies. This research is sponsored in part bythe KDI program of the National Science Foundation.