Attending VIS 2015 in Chicago this year? Lucky you! We’ve compiled an overview of papers that sound relevant to our medical visualization interests and have some recommendations on what workshops, tutorials and sessions to attend to maximize your medvis experience. Can’t make it this year? No worries, there will be a full conference report afterwards.

Sunday:

• On Sunday there’s a workshop on Visual Analytics in Healthcare (8:30am–5:55pm) in the Empire if VA is your jam.
• If VA is not your jam, I recommend going to this tutorial:
  Rejuvenated Medical Visualization—LargeScale, Whole-Body Visualization, Visualizing Physiology, Non-standard imaging and Simulations, and Cohort Studies featuring Steffen Oeltze-Jafra, Anders Ynnerman, Stefan Bruckner and Helwig Hauser from 8:30am–12:10pm at the Monroe. Check the trailer: 
• In the afternoon you can then stay in the Monroe for the tutorial on Direct Volume Interaction for Visual Data Analysis with Alexander Wiebel, Tobias Isenberg, Stefan Bruckner and Timo Ropinski from 14:00-17:55. There’s a video too: 

Monday:

• If you’re interested in uncertainty visualization, there is a full day
  workshop (8:30am-5:55pm) in the Empire room: Visualization for Decision Making Under Uncertainty featuring Kristin Potter, Ruediger Westermann, Christoph Heinzl, Mike Kirby, Ross Whitaker, Eduard Groller, Torsten
  Möller and Stefan Bruckner.
• If you’re up for some Paraview in the afternoon there is a tutorial (2:00pm-5:55pm) in the Adams room, appropriately entitled The ParaView Tutorial
• In the evening (7:00pm-9:00pm) there is a Practicioner event in the Empire, featuring a talk on “Visual Exploration in Surgery Monitoring for Coronary Vessels”: 

Tuesday:

• The first SciVis session in the State “SciVis Intro + Biomedical and Molecular Visualization (I)” (10:30am-12:10pm) is a definite must-see:
  • Accurate Interactive Visualization of Large Deformations and Variability in Biomedical Image (J)
    Authors: Max Hermann, Anja C. Schunke, Thomas Schultz, Reinhard Klein
  • Real-Time Molecular Visualization Supporting Diffuse Illumination and Ambient Occlusion (J)
    Authors: Robin Skånberg, Pere-Pau Vázquez, Victor Guallar, Timo Ropinski
    Video Preview
  • Occlusion-free Blood Flow Animation with Wall Thickness Visualization (J)
    Authors: Kai Lawonn, Sylvia Glasser, Anna Vilanova, Bernhard Preim, Tobias Isenberg
  • NeuroBlocks: Visual Tracking of Segmentation and Proof-Reading for Large Connectomics Projects (J)
    Authors: Ali Al-Awami, Johanna Beyer, Daniel Haehn, Narayanan Kasthuri, Jeff W. Lichtman, Hanspeter Pfister, Markus Hadwiger
    Video Preview
• After lunch, get ready for another SciVis session in the State on Comparative, Ensemble and Uncertainty Visualization (2:00pm-3:40pm):
  • Streamline Variability Plots for Characterizing the Uncertainty in Vector Field Ensembles (J)
    Authors: Florian Ferstl, Kai Bürger, Rüdiger Westermann
    Video Preview
  • Isosurface Visualization of Data with Nonparametric Models for Uncertainty (J)
    Authors: Tushar Athawale, Elham Sakhaee, Alireza Entezari
    Video Preview
  • Effective Visualization of Temporal Ensembles (J)
    Authors: Christopher Healey, Lihua Hao, Steffen Bass
    Video Preview
  • Glyph-based Comparative Visualization for Diffusion Tensor Fields (J)
    Authors: Changgong Zhang, Thomas Schultz, Kai Lawonn, Elmar Eisemann, Anna Vilanova
    
  • Multi-field Pattern Matching based on Sparse Feature Sampling (J)
    Authors: Zhongjie Wang, Hans-Peter Seidel, Tino Weinkauf
    Video Preview
• For Tuesday’s finale, yet another interesting SciVis session in the State room regardig Reconstruction, Rendering and Evaluation (4:15pm-5:55pm):
  • Towards an Understanding of Mobile Touch Navigation in a Stereoscopic Viewing Environment for 3D Data Exploration (T)
    Authors: David López, Lora Oehlberg, Candemir Doger, Tobias Isenberg
    Video Preview
  • Reconstruction and Visualization of Coordinated 3D Cell Migration Based on Optical Flow (J)
    Authors: Christopher Paul Kappe, Lucas Schütz, Stefan Gunther, Lars Hufnagel, Steffen Lemke, Heike Leitte
    Video Preview
  • Gaze Stripes: Image-Based Visualization of Eye Tracking Data (J)
    Authors: Kuno Kurzhals, Marcel Hlawatsch, Florian Heimerl, Michael Burch, Thomas Ertl, Daniel Weiskopf
    Video Preview
  • Anisotropic Ambient Volume Shading (J)
    Authors: Marco Ament, Carsten Dachsbacher
    Video Preview
  • JiTTree: A Just-in-Time Compiled Sparse GPU Volume Data Structure (J)
    Authors: Matthias Labschütz, Stefan Bruckner, Eduard Gröller, Markus Hadwiger, Peter Rautek
    

Wednesday:

• Wednesday morning you have a difficult choice to make ^^, both the SciVis and VAST sessions look interesting:
  • SciVis in the State: Tasks and Applications (8:30am-10:10am):
    • A Classification of User Tasks in Visual Analysis of Volume Data (C)
      Authors: Bireswar Laha, Doug Bowman, David Laidlaw, John Socha
      Video Preview
    • Using Maximum Topology Matching to Explore Differences in Species Distribution Models (C)
      Authors: Jorge Poco, Harish Doraiswamy, Marian Talbert, Jeffrey Morisette, Claudio Silva
      Video Preview
    • Visual Verification of Space Weather Ensemble Simulations (C)
      Authors: Alexander Bock, Asher Pembroke, M. Leila Mays, Lutz Rastaetter, Anders Ynnerman, Timo Ropinski
      Video Preview
    • A Visual Voting Framework for Weather Forecast Calibration (C)
      Authors: Hongsen Liao, Yingcai Wu, Li Chen, Thomas M. Hamill, Yunhai Wang, Kan Dai, Hui Zhang, Wei Chen
      Video Preview
    • Real-time Uncertainty Visualization for B-Mode Ultrasound (C)
      Authors: Christian Schulte zu Berge, Denis Declara, Christoph Hennersperger, Maximilian Baust, Nassir Navab
      
  • At the same time, the VAST session in the Red room, Visual Analytics in Medicine and Healthcare, also looks tempting (8:30am-10:10am):
    • VisOHC: Designing Visual Analytics for Online Health Communities (J)
      Authors: Bum Chul Kwon, Sung-Hee Kim, Sukwon Lee, Jaegul Choo, Jina Huh, Ji Soo Yi
      Video Preview
    • 3D Regression Heat Map Analysis of Population Study Data (J)
      Authors: Paul Klemm, Kai Lawonn, Sylvia Glasser, Uli Niemann, Kathrin Hegenscheid, Henry Voíölzke, Bernhard Preim
      
    • Supporting Iterative Cohort Construction with Visual Temporal Queries (J)
      Authors: Josua Krause, Adam Perer, Harry Stavropoulos
      Video Preview
    • PhenoBlocks: Phenotype Comparison Visualizations (J)
      Authors: Michael Glueck, Peter Hamilton, Fanny Chevalier, Simon Breslav, Azam Khan, Daniel Wigdor, Michael Brudno
      Video Preview
    • Integrating Predictive Analytics into a Spatio-Temporal Epidemic Simulation (C)
      Authors: Chris Bryan, Xue Wu, Susan Mniszewski, Kwan-Liu Ma
      Video Preview
• The SciVis sessions after the morning session are
  Feature Extraction and Flows (10:30am-12:10pm) and Maps, Geometry and Terrain (4:15pm-5:55pm), neither of which seem to contain any medvis.

Thursday:

• Thursday morning starts with another interesting SciVis session in the State room Interfaces, Languages and Systems (8:30am-10:10am):
  • Diderot: a Domain-Specific Language for Portably Parallel Scientific Visualization and Image Analysis (J)
    Authors: Gordon Kindlmann, Charisee Chiw, Nicholas Seltzer, Lamont Samuels, John Reppy
    Video Preview
  • Visualization-by-Sketching: An Artist’s Interface for Creating Multivariate Time-Varying Data (J)
    Authors: David Schroeder, Daniel Keefe
    Video Preview
  • CAST: Effective and Efficient User Interaction for Context-Aware Selection in 3D Particle Clouds (J)
    Authors: Lingyun Yu, Konstantinos Efstathiou, Petra Isenberg, Tobias Isenberg
    Video Preview
  • Intuitive Exploration of Volumetric Data Using Dynamic Galleries (J)
    Authors: Daniel Jönsson, Martin Falk, Anders Ynnerman
    
  • Scalable Parallel Distance Field Construction for Large-Scale Applications (T)
    Authors: Hongfeng Yu, Jinrong Xie,  Kwan-Liu Ma, Hemanth Kolla, Jacqueline H. Chen
    Video Preview
• After the coffee break, a medvis-free SciVis session in the State featuring Vectors, Acceleration, and Hardware (10:30am-12:10pm)
• In the afternoon, there is another choice to make between CG&A and SciVis:
  • There’s a SciVis session in the State on Multivariate and Tensor Visualization (2:00pm-3:40pm):
    • Interactive Visualization for Singular Fibers of Functions f: R3->R2 (J)
      Authors: Daisuke Sakurai, Osamu Saeki, Hamish Carr, Hsiang-Yun Wu, Takahiro Yamamoto, David Duke, Shigeo Takahashi
      Video Preview
    • Association Analysis for Visual Exploration of Multivariate Scientific Data Sets (J)
      Authors: Xiaotong Liu, Han-Wei Shen
      Video Preview
    • Mining Graphs for Understanding Time-Varying Volumetric Data (J)
      Authors: Yi Gu, Chaoli Wang, Tom Peterka, Robert Jacob, Seung Hyun Kim
      Video Preview
    • Visualizing Tensor Normal Distributions at Multiple Levels of Detail (J) 
      Authors: Amin Abbasloo, Vitalis Wiens, Max Hermann, Thomas Schultz
      
    • Adaptive Multilinear Tensor Product Wavelets (J)
      Authors: Kenneth Weiss, Peter Lindstrom
      Video Preview
  • The CG&A session at the Empire deals with Application-Tailored Visualizations (2:00pm-3:40pm) and features among other topics, this medvis-related paper:
    • Interactive Visual Analysis of Heterogeneous Cohort Study Data
      Authors: Paolo Angelelli, Steffen Oeltze, Judit Haász, Cagatay Turkay, Erlend Hodneland, Arvid Lundervold, Astri J. Lundervold, Bernhard Preim, Helwig Hauser
      

Friday:

• Friday morning starts with part two our favorite session topic Biomedical and Molecular Visualization (II) in the State (8:30am-10:10am):
  • AnimoAminoMiner: Exploration of Protein Tunnels and their Properties in Molecular Dynamics (J)
    Authors: Jan Byška, Mathieu Le Muzic, Eduard Gröller, Ivan Viola, Barbora Kozlikova
    Video Preview
  • Exploration of the Brain’s White Matter Structure through Visual Abstraction and Multi-Scale Local Fiber Tract Contraction (T)
    Authors: Maarten H. Everts, Henk Bekker, Jos B.T.M. Roerdink, Tobias Isenberg
    
  • Cluster Analysis of Vortical Flow in Simulations of Cerebral Aneurysm Hemodynamics (J)
    Authors: Steffen Oeltze-Jafra, Juan R. Cebral, Gábor Janiga, Bernhard Preim
    

Medvis.org-contributor Kai Lawonn will be representing team medvis.org at the event, so be sure to go say hi to him if you see him (you might get one of the extremely-limited-edition medvis.org business cards ;)). Besides representing, he’s also presenting his work Tuesday morning in the ‘SciVis Intro + Biomedical and Molecular Visualization
(I)’-session, so don’t miss that one either ^^. I would like to wish all attendees a great time at VIS! Good luck and have fun! For those left behind like me, I can only wish Scivis does a little tweeting for a change 😉