Category Archives: Conferences

IEEE PacificVis 2013 Sydney Conference Report

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(We are grateful and happy that Alexander Bock, of the Linköping University, Sweden SciVis group could write this short report on the medical visualization-related papers at IEEE PacificVis 2013 for us.)

“Bättre sent än aldrig”, “Besser spät als nie”, “Better late than never”. If a lot of different languages have proverbs for this concept, there must be some truth at the bottom of it. With almost 2 months of delay and after spending the last 2 weeks in PVSD (PostVis Stress Disorder), I will present some of my personal reflections regarding the IEEE PacificVis conference that took place in central Sydney, Australia this year.

The event was hosted by the University of Sydney and three researchers from this university — Peter Eades, Seok-Hee Hong and Karsten Klein were the public faces that guided the conference participants through the event. I am well aware that there are many
andd more people responsible for the organization and execution of the conference and I would like to thank all of those for their splendid work as well. Despite some minor location-related problems — yes, I’m looking at you, projectors! —, the conference was seemingly bug-free and ready to ship! All of the talks at the conference were recorded and I was assured that those videos would see the light of day at some point in the near future. At the time of writing this future has not happened yet, so there will be an update as soon as the presentations are made available.

The greater event started on Tuesday with the opening of the first PacificVAST workshop colocated with PacificVis and a great tutorial on Graph Drawing by Karsten Klein. I can say that for me, as a not graph-ically literate person, it was a very good overview and an even better introduction to the many graph drawing presentations that were to come during the next days. All of the presentations at PacificVAST this year were invited talks, but the organizers are happy to receive nice papers for PacificVAST 2014.

The first day of PacificVis began with a keynote given by Giuseppe Di Battista from the Università Roma Tre, who made one of his few trips outside of Italy to present this insightful thoughts about Graph Animation. Adding the challenge of temporal consistency to the already hard problem of finding good layouts for big graphs was a very interesting topic indeed.

The first two sessions of the day were concerned with “Text and Map Visualization” and “Big Data Visualization”. For brevity’s sake, I’m only highlighting one of the papers, namely “Reordering Massive Sequence Views: Enabling Temporal and Structural Analysis of Dynamic Networks” [1] by Stef van den Elzen et al. from SynerScope and the University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands, since –spoiler-alert– they won the Best Paper Award of the conference. They extended Massive Sequence Views to analyze dynamic networks and enable the user efficiently and effectively detect features in big, time-varying datasets.

Stef van den Elzen, Danny Holten, Jorik Blaas, and Jarke J. van. Wijk: Reordering Massive Sequence Views: Enabling Temporal and Structural Analysis of Dynamic Networks

Stef van den Elzen, Danny Holten, Jorik Blaas, and Jarke J. van. Wijk: Reordering Massive Sequence Views: Enabling Temporal and Structural Analysis of Dynamic Networks [1]

The third session was titled “Volume Rendering” and featured four very nice papers. “Local WYSIWYG Volume Visualization” [2] by Guo and Yuan from the Peking University, China is an improvement of their Vis 2011 paper “WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) Volume Visualization” [3], which applies the in-place, stroke-based editing to general spatially localized transfer functions.

Hanqi Guo and Xiaoru Yuan: Local WYSIWYG Volume Visualization

Hanqi Guo and Xiaoru Yuan: Local WYSIWYG Volume Visualization [2].

The second paper called “Transfer Function Design based on User Selected Samples for Intuitive Multivariate Volume Exploration” [4] by Zhou and Hansen from the SCI Institute, University of Utah, USA, uses user selected samples in multivariate data to generate high dimensional transfer functions and allows the user to improve this transfer function with brushing and linking.

Liang Zhou and Charles Hansen: Transfer Function Design based on User Selected Samples for Intuitive Multivariate Volume Exploration

Liang Zhou and Charles Hansen: Transfer Function Design based on User Selected Samples for Intuitive Multivariate Volume Exploration [4].

“Evaluation of Depth of Field for Depth Perception in DVR” [5] by Grosset et al., also from the SCI Insitute, is a very nice evaluation of using Depth of Field effects in Direct Volume Rendering contexts. Requiring the user to depth-sort points in a rendering, they found that using a Depth of Field rendering technique is not always beneficial. In fact, DoF is beneficial if the feature is close to the camera, but the user performs worse in this task if the feature is at the far end of the object.

A.V. Pascal Grosset, Mathias Schott, Georges-Pierre Bonneau, and Charles Hansen: Evaluation of Depth of Field for Depth Perception in DVR

A.V. Pascal Grosset, Mathias Schott, Georges-Pierre Bonneau, and Charles Hansen: Evaluation of Depth of Field for Depth Perception in DVR [5].

The last paper in this session was “Transformations for Volumetric Range Distribution Queries” [6] by Martin and Shen from The Ohio State University, USA. They use a pre-processing step on big, volumetric data to allow for fast and efficient range queries during the rendering.

Steven Martin and Han-Wei Shen: Transformations for Volumetric Range Distribution Queries

Steven Martin and Han-Wei Shen: Transformations for Volumetric Range Distribution Queries [6].

The second day of the conference was started by the second keynote given by Chuck Hansen from the SCI Insitute, University of Utah. His topic of choice “Big Data: A Scientific Visualization Perspective” shed light on the Post-Petascale era of Scientific Visualization that is soon to come. As computing power increases exponentially not only for visualization researchers but also for the researchers who are writing physical simulations, the amount of data that experts have to be able to handle and analyze will increase exponentially as well. Glorious times ahead!

The first session of the second day was called “Visualization in Medicine and Natural Sciences” and started with “Guiding Deep Brain Stimulation Interventions by Fusing Multimodal Uncertainty Regions” [7] presented by me, Alexander Bock, from Linköping University, Sweden. So much for objectivity, but I will try nevertheless. In this paper we demonstrated a system to support the surgeon during a Deep Brain Stimulation intervention by showing him/her a combined view of all the measured data along with their associated uncertainty.

Alexander Bock, Norbert Land, Gianpaolo Evangelista, Ralph Lehrke, and Timo Ropinski: Guiding Deep Brain Stimulation Interventions by Fusing Multimodal Uncertainty Regions

Alexander Bock, Norbert Land, Gianpaolo Evangelista, Ralph Lehrke, and Timo Ropinski: Guiding Deep Brain Stimulation Interventions by Fusing Multimodal Uncertainty Regions [7].

The second paper in this session was “Discovering and Visualizing Patterns in EEG Data” [8] by Anderson et al. from the University of Utah. They had very high-dimensional EEG data from various patient trials and use cross-correlations and pattern detection to generate a spatio-temporal visualization to allow the expert to detect relationships between signals.

Erik W. Anderson, Catherine Chong, Gilbert A. Preston, and Cláudio T. Silva: Discovering and Visualizing Patterns in EEG Data

Erik W. Anderson, Catherine Chong, Gilbert A. Preston, and Cláudio T. Silva: Discovering and Visualizing Patterns in EEG Data [8].

Following two non-medical papers, Silvia Born from the University of Leipzig, Germany, presented her paper “Illustrative Visualization of Cardiac and Aortic Blood Flow from 4D MRI Data” [9]. In this work she generates simple and illustrative visualizations of blood flow patterns based on 4D MRI data. Extending her work “Visual 4D MRI Blood Flow Analysis with Line Predicates” from PacificVis 2012 [10], she created an even more intuitive and easy-to-understand rendering of the measured velocity vector field.

Silvia Born, Michael Markl, Matthias Gutberlet, Gerik Scheuermann: Illustrative Visualization of Cardiac and Aortic Blood Flow from 4D MRI Data

Silvia Born, Michael Markl, Matthias Gutberlet, Gerik Scheuermann: Illustrative Visualization of Cardiac and Aortic Blood Flow from 4D MRI Data [9].

Of all the good posters that were presented at the conference, I want to highlight one with the title “Efficient Visibility-driven Transfer Function for Dual-Modal PET-CT Visualization using Adaptive Binning” by Jung et al. from the University of Sydney, Australia. They described a faster technique to calculate visibility histograms by using a binning approach on a clustered version of the scanned data.

Jung et al.: "Efficient Visibility-driven Transfer Function for Dual-Modal PET-CT Visualisation using Adaptive Binning" poster.

Jung et al.: “Efficient Visibility-driven Transfer Function for Dual-Modal
PET-CT Visualisation using Adaptive Binning” poster.

As this post is already far too long, and none of the remaining sessions (namely: “Time–varying and Multivariate Visualization”, “Visual Analytics”, ”Tree and Graph Visualization” and “Vector and Tensor Fields Visualization” contained directly medvis research, I will wrap this one up by thanking all of the speakers and the organizers and by stating that I could unfortunately only present a small subset of all the good papers that were presented at the conference. As soon as the Proceedings are published, I hope that everybody can reach the same conclusion.

  • [1] Stef van den Elzen, Danny Holten, Jorik Blaas, and Jarke J. van. Wijk: “Reordering Massive Sequence Views: Enabling Temporal and Structural Analysis of Dynamic Networks.”
  • [2] Hanqi Guo and Xiaoru Yuan: “Local WYSIWYG Volume Visualization.” URL: http://vis.pku.edu.cn/research/publication/PacificVis13_ltf.pdf
  • [3] Hanqi Guo, Ningyu Mao, and Xiaoru Yuan: “WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) Volume Visualization.” URL: http://vis.pku.edu.cn/research/publication/Vis11_wysiwyg-small.pdf
  • [4] Liang Zhou and Charles Hansen: “Transfer Function Design based on User Selected Samples for Intuitive Multivariate Volume Exploration.”
  • [5] A.V. Pascal Grosset, Mathias Schott, Georges-Pierre Bonneau, and Charles Hansen: “Evaluation of Depth of Field for Depth Perception in DVR.” URL: http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/76/25/48/PDF/dofEval.pdf
  • [6] Steven Martin and Han-Wei Shen: “Transformations for Volumetric Range Distribution Queries.”
  • [7] Alexander Bock, Norbert Land, Gianpaolo Evangelista, Ralph Lehrke, and Timo Ropinski: “Guiding Deep Brain Stimulation Interventions by Fusing Multimodal Uncertainty Regions.” URL: http://scivis.itn.liu.se/publications/2013/BLELR13//pavis13-dbs.pdf
  • [8] Erik W. Anderson, Catherine Chong, Gilbert A. Preston, and Cláudio T. Silva: “Discovering and Visualizing Patterns in EEG Data.”
  • [9] Silvia Born, Michael Markl, Matthias Gutberlet, Gerik Scheuermann: “Illustrative Visualization of Cardiac and Aortic Blood Flow from 4D MRI Data.”
  • [10] Silvia Born, Matthias Pfeifle, Michael Markl, Gerik Scheuermann: “Visual 4D MRI Blood Flow Analysis with Line Predicates.” URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6178307

2013 IEEE Scientific Visualization Contest: Developmental Neuroscience Challenge

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I suppose the theme of the 2013 IEEE Scientific Visualization Contest (a VisWeek 2013 event) is strictly speaking more biovis than medvis, but I thought I’d still mention it here, since the fields are so closely related. In any case, the theme for this year’s scivis contest is developmental neuroscience! There is a dataset available (the Allen Developing Mouse Brain Atlas) tracking the level of gene expression for 2000 genes in 6 stages, organized into 11 categories, in a 3D mouse brain. So that’s a grand total of 12000 expression energy volumes at your disposal.

The challenge is to visualize gradients, structural patterns, structure consistency and complementary patterns for the complete dataset. If you’re up for participating in this contest, you can find more information here. The deadline for the contest is 31 July 2013.

Report on the Medical Visualization highlights of VisWeek 2012

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(We are once again very happy and grateful that Dr. Steffen Oeltze from the University of Magdeburg Visualization Group could write this short report on the medical visualization-related papers at IEEE VisWeek 2012 for us.)

This year, IEEE VisWeek hosted no special session dedicated to medical visualization but
five contributions to this field were spread over the conference program.

Jian Chen from the University of Maryland gave a talk on how stereo and screen size effect the legibility of three-dimensional streamtube visualizations. The effects were studied in the context of visually exploring dense fiber tracts reconstructed from diffusion magnetic resonance imaging data. A user study comprising 12 participants who had to perform five different tasks, e.g., find the endpoints of fiber tracts and judge if tracts belong to the same bundle, was carried out. In contrast to the initial hypotheses of Chen and
colleagues, completion time did not improve by using a larger display and performance accuracy was even hurt by introducing stereo. See the paper for further exploration of the results [1].

Rocco Gasteiger from the University of Magdeburg, Germany gave a compelling talk on the automatic detection and visualization of qualitative hemodynamic characteristics in cerebral aneurysms. He focused on the so-called inflow jet and the impingement zone, both being characteristics which are correlated with the risk of aneurysm rapture. Special care was taken in generating expressive visualizations of the detected features by means of glyphs, texture, Fresnel shading, and surface contours. The work was rounded off by a user study involving six domain experts who show high interpersonal variance in manually specifying the features but agreed on the good value of the presented visualizations [2]. A supplemental video can be watched here:

YouTube Preview Image

Markus Hadwiger from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia presented the first volume visualization system that scales to petascale volumes imaged as a continuous stream of high-resolution electron microscopy images. Markus and his team developed the system in collaboration with neuroscientists who wish to analyze brain function by measuring large blocks of brain tissue. The system can accept a constant stream of 2D image tiles from a microscope thereby handling missing data naturally and avoiding the expensive computation of any 3D multi-resolution representation such as an octree. A novelty of the system is that most computations are restricted to the currently visible volume data [3]. Watch the accompanying video here:

Alexander Bock from the Linköping University, Sweden presented the ray-casting of high-order finite element (FE) models for visualizing and analyzing strain of the human heart muscle. A straightforward ray-casting approach is inadequate for interactive data exploration due to the computational complexity of transforming the sample points along each ray into the non-uniform grid of the FE model. Hence, Alexander and his colleagues decoupled the expensive transformation from the rendering stage by means of proxy rays cast in FE space, thereby allowing it to be performed within a precomputation stage. The nice work was rounded off by an analysis of the error that is introduced by the presented approach [4].

Gunnar Läthén, also from the Linköping University, Sweden, gave a talk on improving transfer functions for volume rendering blood vessels in computed tomography angiography (CTA) data [5]. These data are acquired by means of injecting a contrast agent, which leads to an enhancement of the vessels. Due to variations in mixture concentration of contrast agent in the blood stream, the enhancement varies locally and transfer function presets often do not yield optimal images. Hence, Gunnar and his colleagues propose an automatic, optimization-based method that shifts transfer function presets to account for general deviations and local variations of the intensity of contrast enhanced blood vessels. The method is illustrated for clinically relevant CT angiography datasets.

edited to add: I’ve received a tip from an anonymous reader that those interested in direct volume rendering might want to take a look at this work, which was also presented at VisWeek this year by Daniel Jönsson: Historygrams: Enabling Interactive Global Illumination in Direct Volume Rendering using Photon Mapping [6]

Example rendering from ‘Historygrams: Enabling Interactive Global Illumination in Direct Volume Rendering using Photon Mapping’.

References

EG VCBM 2012 Norrköping (Sweden) Report

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I started writing this post in the train from Norrköpping back to Stockholm Arlanda airport after visiting the truly excellent EG VCBM 2012 (Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine). While enjoying the beautiful view on the stunning Swedish landscape that features many lakes, trees with autumn leaves and a nice autumn sun, I briefly summarized the conference highlights. Please note that these were the conference highlights for me personally, and are not necessarily a reflection of the actual conference highlights. There were so many great talks, I lost count, but in the interest of not making this blog post drag on for too long, I’ll restrict myself to just briefly summarizing a couple of them here.

The first day started with a word of welcome from the chairs Timo Ropinski and Anders Ynnerman and an excellent keynote by Anders Persson (Director of the CMIV): ‘Visualization of Quantified Medical Image Data – Key to the Future?’. While showing us beautiful datasets acquired from Dual Energy CT (DECT), he stressed the importance of making quantified imaging data usable in clinical practice. This can be achieved by working in close collaboration with medical centers to make sure the techniques we are developing are usable by and useful to clinicians or medical researchers.

Dual-energy CT (DECT) with two X-ray sources running simultaneously at different energies allows obtaining additional information about the elementary chemical composition of computer tomography scanned material [1].

The first session of the first day, Tractography and Connectivity, featured a talk by Anne Berrescalled ‘Tractography in Context: Multimodal Visualization of Probabilistic Tractograms in Anatomical Context’ [2]. Her approach is a way of handling the visibility issues that arise when presenting probabilistic tractograms within anatomical context. Probabilistic tractography data is presented in a ‘glass brain’ rendering that provides anatomical context together with an MRI slice plane, in a collaboration with neurological domain experts.

Tractography data in anatomical context [2].

In the Ultrasound session, the talk by Daniel Tenbrinck entitled ‘Impact of Physical Noise Modeling on Image Segmentation in Echocardiography’ really stood out for me [3]. Not only was it presented extremely skillfully, but the authors made a convincing argument against the frequently used Gaussian noise model assumption and demonstrated the positive effect of chosing a more suitable model such as the Loupas model. In this same session, Veronika Solteszova and Linn Emilie Saevil Helljesenpresented a new way of filtering 3D ultrasound using lowest-variance streamlines that reduces noise in 3D ultrasound datasets with impressive results [4].

Raw 3D ultrasound scan on the left and a visualization of the same dataset filtered with the lowest-variance streamline method [4].

The final session of the day, on Multimodality included a great talk by Florian Weilerpresenting his work ‘On the Value of Multi-Volume Visualization for Preoperative Planning of Cerebral AVM Surgery’ [5]. In the surgical treatment of cerebral arteriovenous malformations (AVMs), thorough preoperative planning is required using information about the arteries and veins of the lesion from different image sets. The authors merge these image sets and visualize them in an interactive application.

Multi-Volume Visualization for Preoperative
Planning of Cerebral AVM Surgery [5].

Before making our way to the conference dinner, we were given a very special tour of the universe by Anders Ynnerman. I’m typically not at all interested in space stuff, but this was something else! Anders actually showed us the entire universe in the Dome, using real data from NASA. Besides the visually stunning features of this tour, Anders managed to make it a truly amazing experience by providing commentary full of interesting anecdotes and impressive facts. The feeling that you get when experiencing all this is very hard to describe, so I will not even try. But I will say this though, if you’re ever in the area and get the chance to see this, go for it!

On the second conference day, the Segmentation and Simulation session’s second talk presented by Frank Heckel ‘Sketch-based Image-Independent Editing of 3D Tumor Segmentations Using Variational Interpolation’ was also very interesting [6]. By allowing the user to intuitively draw adjustments on single slices, automatic segmentations can easily be adjusted by medical experts. This is currently shown on CT, but since the adjustments are not image-based, the technique is valid for arbitrary modalities.

Sketch-based segmentation editing: (a) initial segmentation (yellow), manual correction (blue) and (b) 3D result after editing with our variational-interpolation-based approach [6].

After this session, the Visual Computing Systems session started with the impressive ‘Visually Guided Mesh Smoothing for Medical Applications’ talk by Tobias Moench [7]. The authors provided a way of interactively smoothing a mesh by trying out several parameters and simultaneously show the effect of these settings on mesh quality by using a GPU mesh smoothing implementation. By calculating the model quality for several parameter combinations, an optimal set of smoothing parameters can be automatically suggested as well (click to see a cool realtime mesh smoothing video).

The medvis.org overlord who also happens to be my supervisor, Charl Botha, presented ‘BrainCove: A Tool for Voxel-Wise fMRI Brain Connectivity Visualization’ in the same session [8]. I am obviously biased here, but I thought it was an interesting and entertaining presentation. I mean it featured the BrainCleaver, what’s not to like?

Braincove’s Lambert’s Cylindrical flatmap representation
of the brain, viewing from the anterior in the middle to posterior at the two sides [8].

The final session of the second day, Biology and Radiology, was concluded with an excellent talk by Katja Mogalle ‘Constrained Labeling of 2D Slice Data in Clinical Application’ [9]. Katja did this as her bachelor project (yes, you read that right!) with Siemens. She has thought of an algorithm that uses constraints to place annotation labels in 2D slice data so that they don’t occlude the image, but are close enough to be linked to the area that they describe.

Placement of seven labels in a viewport showing a liver via the shifting approach [9].

Unfortunately we had to catch a flight, so we had to miss the keynote. The best paper award went to “Atomistic Visualization of Mesoscopic Whole-Cell Simulations” presented by Martin Falk and the best poster was “Efficient projection and deformation of volumetric shape and intensity models for accurate simulation of X-ray images” presented by Moritz Ehlke. My personal favorites of all the talks were the ones by Daniel Tenbrinck, Tobias Moench and Katja Mogalle. To conclude this already far too lengthy post, I’d really like to thank the organizers of this excellent workshop. Interesting talks, a beautiful location, good food, great people and a guided tour of the universe. I’m not sure how any conference will ever top this!

References

  • [1] Anders Persson, Christian Jackowskia, Elias Engström and Helene Zachrisson, “Advances of dual source, dual-energy imaging in postmortem CT”, European Journal of Radiology, Volume 68, Issue 3, December 2008, Pages 446–455
  • [2]: Anne Berres, Mathias Goldau, Marc Tittgemeyer, Gerik Scheuermann and Hans Hagen, “Tractography in Context: Multimodal Visualization of Probabilistic Tractograms in Anatomical Context”
  • [3]: D. Tenbrinck, A. Sawatzky, X. Jiang, M. Burger, W. Haffner, P. Willems, M. Paul and J. Stypmann ”Impact of Physical Noise Modeling on Image Segmentation in Echocardiography”
  • [4]: Veronika Šoltészová, Linn Emilie Sævil Helljesen, Wolfgang Wein, Odd Helge Gilja and Ivan Viola, “Lowest-Variance Streamlines for Filtering of 3D Ultrasound”
  • [5]: F. Weiler, C. Rieder, C. A. David, C. Wald, and H. K. Hahn ”On the Value of Multi-Volume Visualization for Preoperative Planning of Cerebral AVM Surgery”
  • [6]: F. Heckel, S. Braunewell, G. Soza, C. Tietjen and H. K. Hahn, “Sketch-based Image-independent Editing of 3D Tumor Segmentations using Variational Interpolation”
  • [7]: Tobias Moench, Christoph Kubisch, Kai Lawonn, Ruediger Westermann and Bernhard Preim,”Visually Guided Mesh Smoothing for Medical Applications”
  • [8]: A.F. van Dixhoorn, J. Milles, B. van Lew and C.P. Botha ”BrainCove: A Tool for Voxel-wise fMRI Brain Connectivity Visualization”
  • [9]: Katja Mogalle, Christian Tietjen, Grzegorz Soza and Bernhard Preim, “Constrained Labeling of 2D Slice Data for Reading Images in Radiology”

Registration still possible for VCBM (aka Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine) next week!

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Next week on September 27 to 28 the third edition of the Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine (VCBM) will be in full swing in Norrköping, Sweden. For us medical visualizationers (is that even a word?) this is one of the most important events to attend, in my humble opinion, because the topics presented are all uniquely relevant to the medvis field. Just take a look at the program and you’ll see what I mean.

In any case, I wanted to let you know it is still possible to register for this amazing event here and that I hope to meet you all there! I (Pelvis Lady) am presenting a poster with Thomas Kroes (aka Exposure Render Guy), so come say hi if you like :)

The medvis.org Conference Calendar

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Inspired by the world-famous VRVis conference calendar at http://confcal.vrvis.at/, I’ve added and maintaining our very own medvis.org medical visualization conference calendar. It features a full calendar view here and some imminent dates appear in the sidebar of this website to the right. The goal of this is to get a quick overview of upcoming submission deadlines, notification dates and conference dates for venues that are known to feature medical visualization research. The full calendar view also allows you to import one or more of the the submission deadline, notification and conference calendars to your own calendar.

It’s still a work in progress for now, so please contact me or leave a comment here if you have an update or addition to suggest.

EuroVis 2012 Vienna Report

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Here’s one for the ‘better late than never’-category: my EuroVis 2012 summary! I’ve kept my eye out for interesting medvis talks and will briefly summarize the ones I have seen here.

I arrived at the TechGate in Vienna just in time for the fast-forward session on Tuesday. This is such a great warm-up to get everyone excited for the rest of the conference and to catch a glimpse of the content of the talks. Everyone got 30 seconds to describe the topic of their talk and to lure the audience there. I had my first attempt at doing such a pitch as well and tried to sell my talk by describing it as a new and exciting visualization field called pelvis. This bought me the dubious nickname ‘Pelvis Lady’ for the rest of the conference.
The second day of the conference featured the Medical Visualization session, chaired by medvis.org’s very own Charl Botha:
Reliable Adaptive Modelling of Vascular Structures with Non-Circular Cross-Sections

Reliable Adaptive Modelling of Vascular Structures with Non-Circular Cross-Sections

  • The second talk was given by Roy van Pelt from the Netherlands: ‘Visualization of 4D Blood-Flow Fields by Spatiotemporal Hierarchical Clustering‘. Using hierarchical clustering, level-of-detail can be selected intuitively while the important flow patterns are still visible. Performance of the algorithm was improved by introducing a coarse hierarchical clustering approach. The flow clusters were visualized using patharrows combined with illustrative anatomical context.
Visualization of 4D Blood-Flow Fields by Spatiotemporal Hierarchical Clustering

Visualization of 4D Blood-Flow Fields by Spatiotemporal Hierarchical Clustering

Employing 2D projections for fast visual exploration of large fiber tracking data

Employing 2D projections for fast visual exploration of large fiber tracking data

Biopsy Planner – Visual Analysis for Needle Pathway Planning in Deep Seated Brain Tumor Biopsy

I really enjoyed attending and presenting at this amazing conference. It’s a great opportunity to meet a lot of wonderful people and listen to interesting talks. It was my first time this year, but I really hope it won’t be the last. Next year, EuroVis 2013 will be held in Leipzig (Germany) from June the 17th until June the 21st, so mark those calendars!
If you haven’t done so already, be sure to check out the great write-ups by Robert Kosara of eagereyes fame: