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:

Scientific programmer vacancy at the TU Eindhoven (The Netherlands)

The TU Eindhoven has a job opening for a scientific programmer working on the open source visualisation software vIST/e – a powerful, platform-independent software solution for the visualization and analysis of complex data (such as obtained from Diffusion Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging). This is a great opportunity to work together with Dr. Anna Vilanova and her group on their DWI software!

The full job offer can be seen here.

VCBM 2012 Norrköping (Sweden) – Call for papers and posters!

The VCBM (AKA Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine) submission deadlines are approaching! The deadline for full paper submission is June 29 and the posters need to be submitted by August 10. So if you’d like to present your work at this excellent location, please take a look at this page.

Open Positions at KAUST – Geometric Modeling and Scientific Visualization Center (Saudi Arabia)

I just returned from Eurovis 2012 and while a more detailed write-up of that will be posted soon, I wanted to let you know about several open positions over at KAUST in Saudi Arabia in the meantime.

An example of the research done at GMSV 'Fused Multi-Volume DVR using Binary Space Partitioning'

The newly formed Geometric Modeling and Scientific Visualization Center (GMSV) is looking for 5-10 post-docs, MS and PhD students as well as short term visitors (2-3 months). A overview of their scivis work so far can be seen here. Contact them by sending an email to gmsvfaculty(a)kaust.edu.sa.

Two Medical Visualisation Ph.D. Vacancies at VRVis in Vienna (Austria)

Katja Bühler’s group at VRVis in Vienna currently has two medical visualisation Ph.D. vacancies. They are looking for two highly motivated young scientists preferably from European Countries interested in medical visualization and in the development of cutting edge solutions for radiotherapy planning.

More details and the description for these jobs can be found here
The lucky person that gets the first position can start right away and the second position will be available from August onwards.

Groundbreaking volume rendering papers by Professor Karl Heinz Höhne: a medvis.org exclusive!

As medvis professionals, we are accustomed to volume rendering as an every-day tool for exploration of medical data. The two technical papers below represent one of the first milestones in rendering volumetric data. We are extremely happy and excited that Professor Karl Heinz Höhne allowed us to post these papers on our blog. Published in 1986 and 1988, these papers cannot be found online anywhere else and proposed groundbreaking volume rendering techniques.

Combined 3D-display of conventional and angiographics MR data.

The first paper entitled ‘Shading 3D-images from CT Using Gray-Level gradients’ by Karl Heinz Höhne and Ralph Bernstein was published in 1986 in the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. This paper describes a shading method based on the partial volume effect using the gray-level gradients along a surface reconstruction of CT images. What sets this method apart from current gradient vector computations is that the gray-values are sampled in screen space and not in voxel space. As a result, surfaces perpendicular to the viewer are brighter than surfaces oriented away from the viewer. In essence, this shading method simulates a headlight configuration.

The second paper entitled ‘Display of Multiple 3D-Objects Using the Generalized Voxel-Model’ by Karl Heinz Höhne, Michael Bomans, Ulf Tiede and Martin Riemer was published in 1988 in the SPIE proceedings. In this paper a generalized voxel-model for the generation of 3D-views from MR-volume data is proposed.

Using the software and hardware that was available at the time, these papers represent many contributions to the field, for instance selective volume clipping and multimodal visualization. With their work, they created a solid foundation for state-of-the-art (medical) volume rendering techniques. The two papers usually credited as first presenting the ideas behind raycasting, both published in 1988, are:

  • R. A. Drebin, L. Carpenter, and P. Hanrahan, “Volume rendering,” SIGGRAPH Comput. Graph., vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 65–74, Aug. 1988.
  • M. Levoy, “Display of surfaces from volume data,” IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 29-37, May 1988.

Visualisation Ph.D. vacancy at the University of Bergen (Norway)

The Department of Informatics at the University of Bergen is hiring a PhD candidate in informatics (but can be visualisation, according to Helwig Hauser). Don’t miss out on this amazing opportunity to become a legendary Visualisation Ninja at one of the best visualization places in the world.

Multi-Aspect Visualization: Going from Linked Views to Integrated Views

An example of work done by the Bergen VisGroup

More details and the job description can be found here. The deadline for applying is the 15th of December.