Strata

While working with the MRI material, I experimented with many methods of data extraction. The video above is not exactly a full work-in-progress recording, but rather a presentation of selected stages from the process of working with the scan itself.

At first, I tried working with images exported using the browser provided by the hospital. I wrote a Python script to stack the images on top of each other in a way that would create a spatial representation of the scan - using the images as an alpha channel and the white areas as an emission shader.

Unfortunately, this approach turned out to be very limiting. I couldn’t really manipulate the object itself. So I tried another method: using Geometry Nodes to turn the images into a point-density map of glowing voxels. That, however, resulted in multiple crashes - and I almost burned out my computer by generating over a million objects in Blender.

Eventually, I discovered a plugin for Blender called Bioxel Nodes, which reads data directly from MRI files. This gave me much more freedom in recovering details from the scan. By adjusting the density threshold, I was able to extract the face, the skull (distorted), the circulatory system, and the brain.