Isosurface

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Zirconocene with an isosurface showing areas of the molecule susceptible to electrophilic attack. Image courtesy of Accelrys (http://www.accelrys.com)

An isosurface is a three-dimensional analog of an isocontour. It is a surface that represents points of a constant value (e.g. pressure, temperature, velocity, density) within a volume of space; in other words, it is a level set of a continuous function whose domain is 3D-space.

Isosurfaces are normally displayed using computer graphics, and are used as data visualization methods in computational fluid dynamics (CFD), allowing engineers to study features of a fluid flow (gas or liquid) around objects, such as aircraft wings. An isosurface may represent an individual shock wave in supersonic flight, or several isosurfaces may be generated showing a sequence of pressure values in the air flowing around a wing. Isosurfaces tend to be a popular form of visualization for volume datasets since they can be rendered by a simple polygonal model, which can be drawn on the screen very quickly.

In medical imaging, isosurfaces may be used to represent regions of a particular density in a three-dimensional CT scan, allowing the visualization of internal organs, bones, or other structures.

Numerous other disciplines that are interested in three-dimensional data often use isosurfaces to obtain information about pharmacology, chemistry, geophysics and meteorology.

A popular method of constructing an isosurface from a data volume is the marching cubes algorithm.

Examples of isosurfaces are 'Metaballs' or 'blobby objects' used in 3D visualisation. A more general way to construct an isosurface is to use the function representation and the HyperFun language.