Exploration of Confocal Raman Microscopy Data

The DFG-project "Interactive Analysis and Visualization of Multi-modal Confocal Raman Microscopy Data" involves the analysis and visualization of the measurement data obtained from our multispectral confocal raman microscopy system. Specifically, the motivation of the project is to detect constituting components and physical structure of the specimen and present the results in a concise and intuitive manner. There are several issues to be considered to realize the mentioned objectives. Imperfections in data due to blurring and noise should be dealt with and the dimensionality of data should be reduced without impairing the data fidelity.

An important aspect of the project is to identify constituting components by comparing the measurement data with a spectral database. The database should be hierarchically structured for a faster search. Another challenge of spectral classification is that the spectrum of each spatial location is usually composed of a mixture of pure reference spectra. This complication is usu-ally tackled with a linear unmixing method.

The visualization stage of the resulting system should have an interactive performance. 3D visualization is realized by ray casting which has become a standard volume rendering method producing high quality visualization in interactive speeds. One of the aims of the project is to provide the users with an intuitive inter-face, through which mapping from the data domain to visual domain can be modified.

This research project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).