Emphatic, interactive volume rendering to support variance in user expertise

Various levels of representation, from abstract to schematic to realistic, have been exploited for millennia to facilitate the transfer of information from one individual to another. Learning complex information, such as that found in biomedicine, proves specifically problematic to many, and requires incremental, stepwise depictions of the information to clarify structural, functional, and procedural relationships. Emerging volume-rendering technique, such as non-photorealistic representation, coupled with advances in computational speeds, especially new graphical processing units, provide unique capabilities to explore the use of various levels of representation in interactive sessions. We have developed a system that produces images that simulate pictorial representations for both scientific and biomedical visualization. The system combines traditional and novel volume illustration techniques. We present examples from our efforts to distill representational techniques for both creative exploration and emphatic presentation for clarity. More specifically, we present our efforts to adapt these techniques for interactive simulation sessions being developed in a concurrent project for resident training in temporal bone dissection simulation. The goal of this effort is to evaluate the use of emphatic rendering to guide the user in an interactive session and to facilitate the learning of complex biomedical information, including structural, functional, and procedural information.