Visibility Equalizer: Cutaway Visualization of Mesoscopic Biological Models

Molecular illustrations tend to be occluded by their own density because of the huge amount of proteins involved. A dataset of an HIV particle within blood serum for example contains 20502 instances of 45 different protein types and 215559 instances of lipid molecules. Therefore cutaways techniques are used as one possible solutions to reveal and analyze the inner structures of organisms. Without an adequate occlusion management they remain hidden. In their paper [Le Muzic et al. 2016] proposed a novel method which on one hand displays a hierarchical list of stacked bars informing the user about the visibility distribution of the individual molecules and on the other hand manages the visibility of different instances in an interactive way using the so called visibility equalizer.

1.) Visibility Equalizer:

The visibility equalizer is represented as a list of stacked bars. The three colors correspond to:

dark green - the ratio of visible instances to total number of instances

light green - the ratio of occluded instances to the total number of instances

gray - the ratio of clipped instances to the total number of instances.

2.) Architecture:
The software is implemented upon the already existing render framework "Marion". The framework is written in C++ and Qt (including OpenGL). Our implementation was developed using Qt Creator. Additionally it was tested on Windows 7, (64bit).