Voxel printing can show a much truer representation of your data by printing every single voxel in your dataset, rather than just a surface as is customary for 3D printing. This novel 3-D printing technique was first reported by Bader et al. in their paper Making data matter: Voxel printing for the digital fabrication of data across scales and domains.

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The data processing workflow in illustrated below: (A) Initial volumetric data from which an external enclosure is generated in (B). (C) Layers are generated and processed in parallel. (D) Here, a voxel intersecting a layer is shown and (E) for each pixel within a given layer, its position information is used to find interpolated values for per-pixel material data from the surrounding voxel. (F) Material information is dithered into binary material deposition descriptions.

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Some volume datasets which are homogeneous (i.e. densely packed neuropil) will benefit more from segmentation than viewing the volume in this way. Printing segmented datasets as a surface is nothing new, but printing inside a transparent block allows for multiple / nested segmentations and for even the finest details and unsupported structures to be preserved.