Implantation of Utah Electrode Array in Cat Auditory Nerve

To clarify the shape of the large bone structures, and the position of the electrode array within them, noise from the CT reconstruction was removed. This processing consisted of using a soft threshold to isolate the voxels in and around the electrode array and its wires, followed by a smoothing operation applied to all other voxels (bone, soft tissue, and air). The visualization method was direct volume rendering with a two-part transfer function, assigning different colors to high and low CT values in order to differentiate between the voxels in the electrode, and the others. The rendering was computed with the SCI Institute's Real-Time Ray Tracer, a multi-threaded ray tracer optimized for the shared memory hierarchy of the SGI Origin 3000 architecture on which it runs.