Volume Data

The modern computed tomography techniques produce a stack of cross sections. Together these represent a volume. Each cross section is stored in the DICOM format in a DICOM data base (known as PACS).

Just a picture element is called pixel, each element of a volume is called Voxel.

Example of a $4x4x4$ volume (cell-centric) resp. $5x5x5$ volume (grid-centric):

Each voxel has the shape of a hexahedron.

Classification of volume data:

• Scalar data (1 value per data point: CT MR)
• Vector data (3 components x,y,z per data point: flow simulationen)
• Tensor data (1 3×3 matrix per data point: fMRI, DTI)