tractography from DTI data

clustered fibers

Filopodium (highlighted)
from confocal microscopy

CT of fractured skull

skeletal motion

David C. Banks, Ph.D.
served as a Visiting Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, 2005-2006. He is a member of the UT/ORNL Joint Institute for Computational Sciences with an appointment in the EECS department at the University of Tennessee. His research interests are focused on visualizing how the developing brain responds to insult and injury, with the goal of using 3D imaging to evaluate rehabilitation therapies.

David Banks received the M.S. degree in Mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he did research on interactive visualization of 4-dimensional data, including a technique for illumination in diverse codimensions; this technique is now referred to as the Banks model of illumination. His post-doctoral training was at NASA Langley Research Center where he developed flow visualization and vortex visualization algorithms at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (ICASE). As a member of the Visualization Thrust at the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center (NSF ERC) for Computational Field Simulation, he received the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award for research in vector field visualization. His paper ``Counting Cases in Marching Cubes'' received the Best Paper award from IEEE Visualization.

E-mail: banks at bwh dot harvard dot edu

[website]	Gliocast.	Gliocast is a set of software tools developed by the Banks Laboratory to create visualizations of fiber tracts.
[video] [google search]	David C. Banks, ``Show me What's Wrong Inside: Making 3D Medical Data Accessible to Everyone,'' Google Tech Talk, Nov 06, 2007.	When millions of individuals upload their 3D medical scans onto the Web, it will become possible for them to compare their injury or pathology to others that are similar, and to compare outcome trajectories resulting from different treatment options.
[pdf]	David C. Banks and Carl-Fredrik Westin, ``Global Illumination of White Matter Fibers From DT-MRI Data,'' Visualization in Medicine and Life Sciences, Springer, 2007, ISBN-10: 3540726292, ISBN-13: 978-3540726296.	We describe our recent work in applying physically-based global illumination to fiber tractography from diffusion tensor MRI of the brain.
[software]	Pane, a physically based renderer.	Pane implements photon mapping and Monte-Carlo path tracing. Pane reads Inventor/VRML-1.0 files, uses octrees, and supports HDR image-based lighting and texture mapping.
[pdf]	David C. Banks and Laith Abu-Raddad, ``The Foundations of Photo-realistic Rendering: From Quantum Electrodynamics to Maxwell's Equations,'' Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Graphics and Visualization in Engineering 2007 (GVE 2007, January 3-7, 2007, Clearwater, FL, USA), M. S. Alam, ed., ACTA Press, ISBN: 978-0-88986-625-6, Paper number 562-044, pp. 137--144.	We describe how the fundamental description of photons, in terms of quantum electrodynamics (QED), yields Maxwell's equations for electromagnetic waves in the limit as the number photons grows large.
[pdf]	David C. Banks and Kevin Beason, ``Fast Global Illumination for Visualizing Isosurfaces with a 3D Illumination Grid,'' Computing in Science & Engineering, Volume 9, Issue 1 (Jan-Feb 2007: special issue on anatomic rendering and visualization), pp. 48--54.	Users who examine isosurfaces of their 3D data sets generally view them with local illumination because global illumination is too computationally intensive. By storing the precomputed illumination in a texture map, visualization systems can let users sweep through globally illuminated isosurfaces of their data at interactive speeds.
[pdf]	Kayne M. Smith, David C. Banks, Neil Druckmann, Kevin Beason, and M. Yousuff Hussaini, ``Clustered Ensemble Averaging: A Technique for Visualizing Qualitative Features of Stochastic Simulations,'' Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience, Vol. 3, No. 5, 2006, pp. 1--9.	We present a technique for displaying the aggregate behavior of nanoscale fluid flows in a simulation of laser-assisted particle removal (LAPR).
[pdf]	Kevin M. Beason, Josh Grant, David C. Banks, Brad Futch, and M. Yousuff Hussaini, ``Pre-computed Illumination for Isosurfaces,'' Visualization and Data Analysis 2006 (SPIE Vol. 6060), pp. 6060B:1-11.	We pre-compute global illumination on level sets within a volume, then interpolate the radiance samples onto a 3D illumination grid, then texture-map the result in real time onto isosurfaces generated within a visualization engine.
[pdf]	Kevin M. Beason and David C. Banks, ``Retro-rendering with Vector-valued Light: Producing Local Illumination from the Transport Equation,'' Visualization and Data Analysis 2006 (SPIE Vol. 6060), pp. 6060C:1-7.	We propose an interpretation of the light transport equation that produces OpenGL-style local illumination, and we demonstrate its correctness in side-by-side comparisons of a rendered scene. The purpose of the model is to establish a theory of rendering with a single governing equation under which either global illumination or local illumination can serve as a correct solution as determined by boundary conditions.
[pdf]	David C. Banks and Wilfredo Blanco, ``InvIncrements: Incremental Software to Support Visual Simulation,'' Visualization and Data Analysis 2006 (SPIE Vol. 6060), pp. 6060I:1-7.	We demonstrate a progressive sequence of instructional software modules to support a curriculum in computational science. The modules use Open Inventor to manage the geometry, the rendering, and the user's interaction with a dynamic 3D problem-solving environment. The modules employ principles of literate programming, producing graphically illustrated code.
[pdf]	David C. Banks and Paul K. Stockmeyer, ``Debruijn Counting for Visualization Algorithms,'' Mathematical Foundations of Scientific Visualization, Computer Graphics, and Massive Data Exploration, Springer-Verlag (in press).	We calculate closed-form solutions for the number of cases of polytope colorings by applying deBruijn's extension of Pólya counting.
[pdf]	David C. Banks, Stephen A. Linton, and Paul K. Stockmeyer, ``Counting Cases in Substitope Algorithms,'' IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 10, No. 4 (July/August 2004), pp. 371-384.	We show how enumerating classes of vertex-colored polytopes can be accomplished by using Pólya counting. This permits us to count numbers of cases that exceed the counting capacity of software for computational group theory.
[pdf]	David C. Banks and Stephen A. Linton, ``Counting Cases in Marching Cubes: Toward a Generic Algorithm for Producing Substitopes,'' IEEE Visualization 2003, pp. 51-58 (chosen Best Paper).	We demonstrate the fundamental similarity of various visualization algorithms (e.g., Marching Squares, Marching Cubes, Marching Hypercubes, Sweeping Simplices, Contour Meshing, Interval Volumes, Separating Surfaces). Each algorithm performs a geometric substitution on polytopes. Analyzing the substitution requires enumerating equivalence classes of vertex colorings, which can be performed using software for computational group theory.
[pdf]	Monica K. Hurdal, Kevin W. Kurtz, and David C. Banks, ``Case Study: Interacting with Cortical Flat Maps of the Human Brain,'' IEEE Visualization 2001, pp. 469-472, 591.	We demonstrate a technique for animating flat-mapping of the cortex of the human brain in order to show the correspondence between the convoluted 3D structure of the surface and a 2D quasi-conformal flattening of it. In order to provide illumination cues for allowing the human visual system to infer shape from shading of the 2D flattened image, we propose a pull-back function from the 3D illuminated surface.
[pdf]	David C. Banks, John T. Foley, Kiril Vidimce, Mong-Hoe Kiu, and Jay Brown, ``Interactive 3D Visualization of Optical Phenomena,'' IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, Vol. 18, No. 4 (July/August 1998), IEEE Computer Society, pp. 66-69.	We describe The Optics Project (TOP), a suite of interactive 3D graphical simulations to visualize and experiment with optical phenomena. The instructional modules in TOP are designed for use in undergraduate physics classes.
[pdf]	Ming-Hoe Kiu, Xiao-Song Du, Robert J. Moorhead, David C. Banks, and Raghu Machiraju, ``Two Dimensional Sequence Compression Using MPEG,'' SPIE Vol. 3309, SPIE/IS&T Electronic Imaging 1997 (San Jose, CA), January 1998, pp. 914-921 (3309-90:1-8)	The MPEG encoding compresses a 1-dimensional array of images in an animation. We show how to extend MPEG to compress the 2-dimensional array of images in a light field (used for image-based 3D rendering from photographs).
[pdf] [blog]	Liqun Jin and David C. Banks, ``TennisViewer: a Browser for Competition Trees,'' IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, Vol. 21, No. 2 (March/April 1997), pergamon Press, pp. 171-178.	We demonstrate a multi-scale visualization of the outcome of a tennis match (from points to games to sets to match) based on transparent overlays in a treemap. The high-level wins colors the lower-level wins so that even when zooming to view the data (e.g., with a magic lens) the larger context can be apprehended.
[pdf]	Chris Weigle and David C. Banks, ``Extracting iso-valued features in 4-dimensional scalar fields,'' IEEE Symposium on Volume Visualization 1998 (Research Triangle Park, NC), pp. 103-110.	We apply 4-dimensional recursive contouring to extract multi-resolution isosurfaces (with scale being the 4th dimension), to extract envelopes of time-varying isosurfaces, and to construct implicit surfaces containing self-intersections.
[pdf]	Chris Weigle and David C. Banks, ``Complex-valued contour meshing,'' IEEE Visualization 1996 (San Francisco, CA). pp. 173-180.	We introduce construction of level sets (contours) from scalar functions and vector-valued functions of four variables. This extends the conventional notion of generating isosurfaces of 3D scalar functions using Marching Cubes. We demonstrate application of the technique is to visualize critical points of homotopies of complex curves, which appear as deforming self-intersecting surfaces when mapped from complex space C^2 to real space R^4 and then projected to R^3.
[pdf] [citeseer]	Greg Turk and David C. Banks, ``Image-guided Streamline Placement,'' Computer Graphics (Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 1996), pp. 453-460.	We algorithmically place streamlines in a vector field by minimizing an energy functional derived as a low-pass filtered version of a rendered image. The technique can also produce multi-resolution streamline images of vector fields.
[pdf]	Ming-Hoe Kiu and David C. Banks, ``Multi-frequency Noise for LIC,'' IEEE Visualization 1996 pp. 121-126.	We construct a multi-resolution flow visualization using Line Integral Convolution (LIC) with a multi-frequency noise texture. This technique allows a broad range of feature sizes to be displayed in an image.
[pdf]	David C. Banks and Bart A. Singer, ``A Predictor-Corrector Technique for Visualizing Unsteady Flow,'' IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 151-163, June 1995.	We present a method for visualizing unsteady flow by displaying its vortices. The vortices are identified by using a vorticity-predictor pressure-corrector scheme that follows vortex cores.
[pdf]	David C. Banks, ``Illumination in Diverse Codimensions,'' Computer Graphics (Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 1994), Vol. 28, pp. 327-334. June 1995.	We present a model of illumination in arbitrarily large dimensions, based on a few characteristics of material and light in three dimensions. The model permits illuminating curves, anisotropic reflectors, and furry surfaces as well as k-manifolds in n dimensions.