EuroVis 2013 Leipzig Conference Report

(We are grateful and overjoyed that Renata Raidou, of the TU Eindhoven University (the Netherlands) could write this short report on the medical visualization-related papers and other highlights at EuroVis 2013 for us.)

This year the EuroVis conference was held in Leipzig, Germany from June 17-21. It was organized by the Image and Signal Processing group of the University of Leipzig in collaboration with the Visualization Group of the University of Magdeburg. This conference was dedicated to the late Dirk Bartz, a former member of the EuroVis Steering Committee, who promoted this conference in Leipzig for many years.

The conference had a really busy program, with five workshops (EuroVA: Workshop on Visual Analytics, EuroRV: Workshop on Reproducibility, Verification, Validataion and Visualization, VMLS: Workshop on Visualization in Medicine and Life Sciences, EnvirVis: Workshop on Visualization in Eniromental Science, VAMP: Workshop on Visual Analytics using Multi-dimensional Projections). They were held in parallel sessions and featured 13 invited talks and 47 contributions of researchers working on visualization around the world. Just to mention few of the remarkable invited talks in the workshops:

  • in EuroVA, Silvia Miksch gave a keynote presentation on Visual Analytics for Time-Oriented Data and Information;
  • in EuroRV, Torsten Möller gave a talk on the Evaluation of Visualization in Science and in Design, Gordon Kindlmann gave a captivating capstone presentation on Reproducibility in Visualization;
  • in VMLS, there were five inspiring invited talks by Horst Hahn, Timo Ropinski, Thomas Schultz, Bernhard Preim and Alexander Wiebel;
  • in EnvirVis, the keynote was given by Joerg Meyer on the challenges in the visualization of environmental data;
  • in VAMP, an interesting talk was given by Tamara Munzner on current research that tries to solve the problem of dimensionality reduction in visualization from different methodological angles of attack.

The official opening of the main conference included a keynote presentation by Peter F. Stadler on “Bio-informatics of non-coding RNA”, followed by a fast forward to all conference presentations, where everyone could advertise their work. The main conference included 49 full papers and 18 short papers, but I will focus on the three talks from the Medical Visualization part, plus a “bonus” talk from the “Volumes” category, also related to medical applications.
The first talk was given by Gabriel Mistelbauer from Vienna University of Technology on “Vessel Visualization using Curvicircular Feature Aggregation”. He described Curvicircular Feature Aggregation (CFA), a new technique for the visualization of blood vessels, which aggregates the images acquired around the centerline using conventional Curved Planar Reformation (CPR) into a single static image. In this way, the rotation of these images is eliminated and vessels can be investigated by inspecting only one image.

Vessel Visualization using Curvicircular Feature Aggregation – G. Mistelbauer

Vessel Visualization using Curvicircular Feature Aggregation – G. Mistelbauer

The second talk was given by Stefan Diepenbrock from the Visualization and Computer Graphics Research Group, University of Münster on “Comparative Visualization of Tracer Uptake in In Vivo Small Animal PET/CT Imaging of the Carotid Arteries”. He described a visualization application which enables the medical expert to explore and analyze in-vivo PET activity around vessels, through a projection technique that renders data around the vessels in a single image. In this way, the user can quickly check for activity maxima, intensity and spread.

Comparative Visualization of Tracer Uptake in In Vivo Small Animal PET/CT Imaging of the Carotid Arteries – S. Diepenbrock

Comparative Visualization of Tracer Uptake in In Vivo Small Animal PET/CT Imaging of the Carotid Arteries – S. Diepenbrock

The third talk was given by Mathias Neugebauer from the Visualization Group of Magdeburg University on “AmniVis – A System for Qualitative Exploration of Near-Wall Hemodynamics in Cerebral Aneurysms”. He described an approach for the selection of surface regions of interest and for 2D overview of flow patterns represented by streamlines at these regions. The AmniVis supports binary classification of patterns and temporal exploration as well as methods for selection, highlighting and automatic 3D navigation to particular patterns.

AmniVis - A System for Qualitative Exploration of Near-Wall Hemodynamics in Cerebral Aneurysms – M. Neugebauer

AmniVis – A System for Qualitative Exploration of Near-Wall Hemodynamics in Cerebral Aneurysms – M. Neugebauer

The last talk was given by Alexey Karimov from Vienna University of Technology on “ViviSection: Skeleton-based Volume Editing”. He described a novel approach for the editing of segmentation results that exploits structural features of the segmented object for correction and verification. In cases of severe pathologies, this new approach can increase the segmentation quality.

ViviSection: Skeleton-based Volume Editing – A. Karimov

ViviSection: Skeleton-based Volume Editing – A. Karimov

The conference was concluded on Friday 21 June by a captivating capstone by Hans Christian Hege on “Visualization in the Neuroscience Era: The Road Ahead” with a promising observation that in the coming years neuroscience and visualization will move towards each other with great and mutual benefit.

The Best Paper Award was given to Sharon Lin et al. for the paper “Selecting Semantically-Resonant Colors for Data Visualization”, while the Best Short Paper Award was given to Alice Thudt et al. for “Visits: A Spatiotemporal Visualization of Location Histories”. Two more papers (“Vector Field k-Means: Clustering Trajectories by Fitting Multiple Vector Fields” by Nivan Ferreira et al. and “Maximum Entropy Summary Trees” by Howard Karloff and Kenneth E. Shirley) also received Honorable Mentions.

I really enjoyed attending this conference. It was my first time at EuroVis and I had the opportunity to meet a lot of amazing people and listen to a very interesting and inspiring talks. Next year, EuroVis2014 will be held in Swansea, South Wales, UK from June the 9th until June the 13th, so put these dates on your agenda!

medvis.org 2012 summary

First of all, happy new year from all of us at medvis.org! May 2013 bring you many job opportunities, research successes and/or good medical visualizations. I’d like to start the new year by looking back at last year briefly. I’ve taken a look at some of our blog statistics and will provide a short summary for those interested below:

The medvis.org Conference Calendar

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

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: