  Cryo-Electron Tomography (cryo-ET) is a new 3D imaging technique with
unprecedented potential for resolving submicron structural detail. Existing
volume visualization methods, however, cannot cope with its very low
signal-to-noise ratio. In order to design more powerful transfer functions, we
propose to leverage soft segmentation as an explicit component of visualization
for noisy volumes. Our technical realization is based on semi-supervised
learning where we combine the advantages of two segmentation algorithms. A
first weak segmentation algorithm provides good results for propagating sparse
user provided labels to other voxels in the same volume. This weak segmentation
algorithm is used to generate dense pseudo labels. A second powerful
deep-learning based segmentation algorithm can learn from these pseudo labels
to generalize the segmentation to other unseen volumes, a task that the weak
segmentation algorithm fails at completely. The proposed volume visualization
uses the deep-learning based segmentation as a component for segmentation-aware
transfer function design. Appropriate ramp parameters can be suggested
automatically through histogram analysis. Finally, our visualization uses
gradient-free ambient occlusion shading to further suppress visual presence of
noise, and to give structural detail desired prominence. The cryo-ET data
studied throughout our technical experiments is based on the highest-quality
tilted series of intact SARS-CoV-2 virions. Our technique shows the high impact
in target sciences for visual data analysis of very noisy volumes that cannot
be visualized with existing techniques.
