MICCAI 2015 – Tutorial on Advanced Medical Visualization report

Update: The slides of all talks are now available here!

MICCAI 2015! This year, MICCAI (International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention) takes place in Munich almost during the Oktoberfest. Sauerkraut, Weißwurst, Beer, and Science. What a great combination! The first day, MICCAI started with a few satellite events. Among these events, for us most relevant: the Tutorial on Advanced Medical Visualization. Most of the big shots in the medical visualization area contributed to this event and talked about ongoing research and the current state of the art in medical visualization. Anna Vilanova and Bernhard Preim were the hosts of this tutorial and introduced it.

Afterwards, Timo Ropinski and Markus Hadwiger gave a general talk about volume rendering. Markus Hadwiger started with an introductory talk. He explained the concept of ray casting and gave implementation details on how to setup the ray casting algorithm. Furthermore, he talked about important aspects one has to keep in mind when implementing a ray casting algorithm and discussed the concept of transfer functions.

In the second half of this talk Timo Ropinski spoke about shading techniques for volume rendering. He gave a nice overview of different algorithms and discussed what kind of technique is useful for what purposes.

 

 

 

In the next session, Stefan Bruckner talked about recent developments in ultrasound visualization. First, he gave an overview of common ultrasound modes, e.g., 2D ultrasound, contrast ultrasound etc. Then, he introduced the state-of-the-art in ultrasound visualization and emphasized the advantages of novel visualization techniques.

The last talk before the coffee break was given by Eduard Gröller. His talk was entitled “Simplifying Medical Visualization through Sparse Interaction and Reformation“. He explained the concept of curved planar reformation and showed other applications where it makes sense to reformat data sets. Here, he gave an example of the left ventricle of the human heart.

After the coffee break, Anna Vilanova talked about blood flow. She talked about the characteristics of cardio-vascular diseases and explained the details on how to obtain blood flow data that can be visualized. Afterwards, she gave illustrative visualization examples applied to vessels and blood flow.

The next talk was about diffusion imaging visualization and given by Thomas Schultz. He introduced diffusion MRI and gave different examples of glyphs to represent those datasets. Furthermore, he also talked about direct volume rendering applied to diffusion MRI and uncertainty visualization.

 

Then, Bernhard Preim talked about visual analytics of cohort study data. First, he introduced the term visual analytics and recent developments. Furthermore, he presented the most famous cohort studies and talked about the challenges and goals with respect to visual analytics.

 

The next talk was given by Anders Ynnerman on interactive visualization of whole-body medical volume data. He mentioned the virtual autopsy as an application for this techniques, where the whole body is scanned. Afterwards, the data can be analyzed to figure out the cause of the death. Furthermore, another application was presented using visualization for analysis of a mummy inside a coffin.

Then, Katja Bühler talked about visual fusion of multi-modal and multi-parametric image data. She mentioned various examples where data are fused to visualize the results, e.g., multi-volume ray casting. Here, some examples such as the combined visualization of PET/CT were shown.

The last talk before the question round is given by Rüdiger Westermann. His talk was about GPU-based biomechanical simulations and steering. In the talk, he presented examples in elastic body simulation, cutting for virtual surgery simulation, and hip-joint implant procedure planning.

The last talk was given by Christoph Bichlmeier on creating an open API for the first digital operating microscope. He works for ARRI and presented recent developments. He also introduced an SDK that allows users to develop their own applications.

After the break, the tutorial was finished with a big panel discussion about open problems in medical image analysis and visualization.

 

In summary, it was a great event for all PhD students, PostDocs, and Professors to learn more about the medical visualization field and to get informed about the current state of the art in medical visualization. In the future, we hope to see more tutorials on medical visualization and we are looking forward to the tutorial on Rejuvenated Medical Visualization at VIS2015 in Chicago in a couple of weeks!