Author Archives: Noeska Smit

Announcing VCBM & MedViz 2016!

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It’s no secret the Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine (VCBM) is one of my favorite events for some years already, all medical visualization all the time! Since last year, it turned into an annual workshop, which means we get to enjoy another VCBM in 2016 already, from the 7th of September until the 9th. This edition promises to be extra epic for several reasons, outlined below:

  1. It will be in Bergen, Norway. Bergen, for those of you that never visited, is a truly amazing city situated between majestic mountains and a beautiful harbor. You could do worse! “The Gateway to the Fjords of Norway”, people!
  2. Additionally, also speaking from personal experience, the Bergen Vis group is filled with awesome people that do great research.
  3. If this is still not convincing you of the epicness, next year the 10th annual Medviz conference will be held at the same time!

‘So where do I sign up?’ I hear you thinking. The official website describing all the details is here, there is a Facebook page for you to like (if not love!) here and even a Facebook event here!

VIS 2015 preview – What to see, what to wear?

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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:

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):
  • 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:

Friday:

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 😉

Conference Report: EG VCBM 2015 Chester (UK)

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Recently I had the pleasure of attending the Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine (VCBM) 2015 conference for the third and potentially, but not hopefully, last time. This year it was held in Chester (UK) at The Riverside Innovation Centre at the University of, you guessed it, Chester! In this conference report I will summarize some personal highlights. Repeating last year’s tradition, I again tweeted a picture for almost every talk. I still don’t think Twitter is really gaining traction among the scivis community, and I wonder what it would take to change it (or if it even needs to change ^^). As every year, given the theme of the conference almost every talk is relevant to our medical visualization interests, but I would like to briefly summarize only a couple of them here. Check the full list of papers and posters presented here if this is not enough to satiate your VCBM-craving-needs. Continue reading →

PhD position available at the Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Germany

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The Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg in Germany has an open position for a PhD Student in Computer Graphics, AR / VR at the Computer-Assisted Surgery group at the Faculty of Computer Science. The research focus is the image guided minimal invasive therapy, especially the development of visualization and interaction techniques for Augmented / Virtual Reality.

Check out the full job description and apply here. The application deadline is the 10th of October, so don’t delay and start sending in those applications!

Python Developer job opening at Clinical Graphics in Delft, the Netherlands

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Clinical Graphics, a fast-growing medical visualization company, is currently looking for a full-time Python Developer to join their team. From their job description: “We make software for the analysis of medical 3D scans of hips and shoulders. This software is used by the company to provide online surgery plans to orthopedic surgeons. Surgeons can predict how well a patient will be able to move after surgery thanks to our analysis service. Surgeons from around the world are sending in their scans for us to analyse.

You will perform challenging development work, designing smart solutions to complex image processing and data exchange problems. The core of our work consists of a pre-operative planning system for orthopedic surgery written in Python, using VTK and various libraries from the SciPy stack, such as NumPy and Matplotlib.

If you’re interested, check out their career page here and the full job description for more details here!

Introducing our new contributor: Kai Lawonn

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I am happy to announce that we have found a new contributor for medvis.org…  Who you might ask? It’s Kai Lawonn!
Kai Lawonn
He is currently a postdoc at the Visualization group in the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg. Last year he defended his PhD thesis in the exciting field of illustrative medical visualization. Before this he studied Mathematics at the Free University Berlin.

With this new addition to our team, expect more frequent updates, new thrilling features and a barrage of beautiful medical non-photorealistic rendering results. As a first course of action, he has added a grand total of 15 new spectacular header images to the site. Hit refresh and see if you can catch them all ^^

VCBM 2015 Chester (UK) call for papers and posters: Deadlines imminent!

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The “Call for Papers and Posters” for VCBM (AKA Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine) 2015 was released a while ago. As you probably already know, VCBM is an excellent venue for medical visualization work and this year it will be held in Chester, UK.

The deadline for full paper submission is June 21st and the posters need to be submitted by August 7th. Don’t miss this opportunity to present your work at this excellent location and please take a look at the website for more details.

Open PhD position at Aviz-Inria (France)

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There is an open position for a PhD at Aviz-Inria in France. They are looking for someone to work on a project on the interesting topic of Structural and Functional Visualization of Brain Connectivity. The project combines the best of both worlds with a mix scivis and infovis approaches. Does this sound like your type of project? If so, keep in mind the application deadline is August 1, 2015 and start working on your application. More information on the project and the position can be found in this pdf.

Karl-Heinz-Höhne-Preis (MedVis-Award) 2014: And the winners are…

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Every two years the VCBM group awards the Karl-Heinz Höhne Award for Medical Visualization (medvis-award for short) to a young scientist in the MedVis field. Candidates for this award focus their innovative research on visualizations clearly related to medical questions.

The official website has not been updated yet, but we have received a tip from Frank Heckel that there has been a press-release announcing the winners (in German). Last year at VCBM, three contestants got awarded for their medical visualization work:

  • In third place: Cees-Willem Hofstede (Delft University of Technology) for his work on the Online Anatomical Human: an online anatomy browser, which allows combined display of medical images and reconstructed 3D models of various anatomical structures.
  • In second place: Frank Heckel (Fraunhofer MEVIS) for his work on interactive correction of segmentation results, such as delineated tumors in CT-scans.
  • In first place: Benjamin Köhler (Universität Magdeburg) for his work on the quantification and visual representation of blood flow data in cardiovascular disease.
2014 Karl-Heinz-Höhne Award (MedVis- Award) winners

Karl-Heinz-Höhne Award (MedVis- Award) winners: from left to right: Cees-Willem Hofstede, Benjamin Köhler and Frank Heckel in the front row. Dr. Stefan Zachow and Dr. Dorit Merhof in the back row.

We would like to congratulate the winners with their well-deserved awards!

Advanced Medical Visualization tutorial at MICCAI 2015!

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(Cross-posted from medvisbook.com: The go-to resource for all things related to the book ‘Visual Computing for Medicine – Second Edition’. Original post written by Charl Botha.)

Bernhard Preim (University of Magdeburg, DE; author of and driving force behind the MedVis book) and Anna Vilanova (Delft University of Technology, NL) are organizing a tutorial on Advanced Medical Visualization at MICCAI 2015, one of the most important technical medical imaging conferences in the world today.

miccai15-logo

Judging by the list of topics and especially the list of speakers, I expect that this is going to be a great tutorial. If you’re going to MICCAI 2015, don’t miss this!