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http://www.sdsc.edu/discovery/lo/vis.htm
Scientific visualization means more than just making pretty pictures. To do the math for solving problems, scientists run programs on supercomputers. These programs produce lots of numbers, and by turning them into images, scientists can "see" what all the numbers mean.
Depending on the program, the numbers might tell you how to rebuild a skull, how a car will crumple when it crashes into a lamp post, or how the atoms are arranged in a molecule. Here's an example.
In the Visible Human Project, they froze a dead woman then sliced her into very thin pieces, from her head to her toes. From the slices, a computer can show just her skull. The white strings held her cheeks up during the process. The Splatter Project at SDSC turns those slices back into pictures.