Visualization through differentiating reflection functions

Conventional visualization media such as computer screens are inherently two dimensional, making them incapable of displaying true 3D volume data sets. By applying only transparency or intensity projection, and ignoring light-matter interaction, results will likely fail to give optimal results. Little research has been done on using reflection functions to visually separate the various segments of a MRI volume. We explore whether applying specific reflection functions to individual anatomical structures can help in building an intuitive 2D image from a 3D dataset. We test our hypothesis by visualizing fMRI activation data because it contains complex and different types of information making it a good candidate for our approach.