(We are happy and grateful that Dr. Steffen Oeltze from the University of Magdeburg Visualization Group could write this short report on the medical visualization session and other medvis-related papers at IEEE VisWeek 2011.)

This year, the IEEE VisWeek has been completed by an excellent session on medical visualization hosting five contributions from three European countries. Roy van Pelt gave a compelling talk on the exploration of cardiovascular 4D MRI blood-flow using stylistic visualizations. His comic-inspired illustrative glyphs coupled with timelines outperform traditional particle renderings. Interactive virtual probing of the flow
avoids a tedious segmentation process in qualitative inspection.

Rostislav Khlebnikov presented a new approach to tumor accessibility planning. It exploits a well-known natural phenomenon related to light scattering at dust particles which is also called crepuscular rays. In the generated 2D/3D images, light beams in different colors that shine through the skin indicate the access paths and their associated risk.

Christian Dick presented new visualization techniques for conveying distances in interactive 3D implant planning. The design of very intuitive distance glyphs and colored slice sets was completed by a carefully accomplished, convincing user study.

Rocco Gasteiger introduced the FlowLens for focus+context visualization of blood flow in cerebral aneurysms. It supports an exploration of certain hemodynamic attributes in the lens region within the context of other attributes thereby avoiding the cognitive effort involved in mental superimposition of side-by-side visualizations. Please watch the supplemental video:

The session was completed by the interesting talk of Artem Amirkhanov on the reduction of metal artifacts in industrial 3D X-ray CT images. He presented a projection-space pipeline in which metal is separated from the other materials before projection and then fused again with the initial reconstruction after projection.

Other talks not being part of the session but also related to medical visualization were given by Claes Lundström on the application of a multi-touch table system to orthopedic surgery planning, Christian Rieder on real-time approximation of the ablation zone for radiofrequency ablation (see the very nice video), Joseph Marino on context preserving maps of tubular structures, e.g., the colon, and Paolo Angelelli on straightening aortic blood flow for side-by-side visualization.