Science magazine has announced its 2007 Visualization Challenge Winners, and the image above — well, won by a nose. The award went to Kai-hung Fung, a radiologist at the Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital in Hong Kong. The image is a computed tomography (CT) scan from a 33-year-old Chinese woman:
Fung chose to use the patient’s CT images for his rendering, he remembers, because “[she had] a very straight nasal septum and wavy maxillary sinuses; … the anatomy was exceptionally beautiful,” he says.
Normally, CT renderings meld slices together into smooth surfaces, but, in what he terms the “Rainbow Technique,” Fung instead broke them apart, creating a topographical map of the airspaces described by the contour lines of individual slices, and colored according to the density of the tissues that border them.
Fung digitally removed the bones, soft tissue, and fat from the rendering to create a solid “cast” of the sinuses’ air envelope. “The sinuses are hollows in the bone just like the central cavity in a papaya,” he says. One way to get a feel for the shape of such a cavity is to look at a cross section of it, but, he says, it’s much more readily apparent in a mold.
The upward-looking angle that Fung used was fascinating, says panel of judges member Sherry Marts. “You react [to the image] on two levels; it piques your curiosity … and then draws you in to the information that’s contained in [it].”
