T-flash: Tensor Visualization in Medical Studio

Tensor valued data are frequently used in medical imaging. For a 3-dimensional second order tensor such data imply at least six degrees of freedom for each voxel. The operators ability to perceive this information is of outmost importance and in many cases a limiting factor for the interpretation of the data. In this paper we propose a decomposition of such tensor fields using the Tflash tensor glyphs that intuitively conveys important tensor features to a human observer. A matlab implementation for visualization of single tensors are described in detail and a VTK/ITK implementation for visualization of tensor fields have been developed as a Medical Studio component.