Visualization of tubular structures such as blood vessels is an important topic in medical imaging. One way to display tubular structures for diagnostic purposes is to generate longitudinal crosssections in order to show their lumen, wall, and surrounding tissue in a curved plane. This process is called Curved Planar Reformation (CPR). We present three different methods to generate CPR images. A tube-phantom was scanned with Computed Tomography (CT) to illustrate the properties of the different CPR methods. Furthermore we introduce enhancements to these methods: thick-CPR, rotating-CPR and multi-path-CPR.

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Oriented Line Integral Convolution (OLIC) illustrates flow fields by convolving a sparse texture with an anisotropic convolution kernel. The kernel is aligned to the underlying flow of the vector field. OLIC does not only show the direction of the flow but also its orientation. This paper presents Fast Rendering of Oriented Line Integral Convolution (FROLIC), which is approximately two orders of magnitude faster than OLIC. Costly convolution operations as done in OLIC are replaced in FROLIC by approximating a streamlet through a set of disks with varying intensity. The issue of overlapping streamlets is discussed. Two efficient animation techniques for animating FROLIC images are described. FROLIC has been implemented as a Java applet. This allows researchers from various disciplines (typically with inhomogenous hardware environments) to conveniently explore and investigate analytically defined 2D vector fields.