(This news was submitted by the Magedeburg Visualization group. We would like to congratulate Rocco Gasteiger with his outstanding work and his summa cum laude defense!)

Rocco Gasteiger

On February 7, 2014 Rocco Gasteiger successfully defended his PhD Thesis “Visual Exploration of Cardiovascular Hemodynamics” with summa cum laude in the Visualization Group (headed by Prof. Bernhard Preim) at the Otto-von-Guericke University (OVGU) Magdeburg. During the work on his PhD Thesis, Rocco provided new contributions to the field of visual exploration of complex morphological and hemodynamic data of cardiovascular diseases with a focus on cerebral aneurysms. In the current clinical and biomedical research, the analysis of measured and simulated blood flow data is of major importance for the examination of diseases, their courses and optimized patient-specific treatment options. The main contributions of the PhD Thesis consist of the development of an expressive visualization method for vessel illustrations with embedded flow information, the automatic extraction of qualitative hemodynamic parameters (see Fig. 1) as well as a flexible focus and context illustration for the examination of multi-parameter data of the hemodynamics (also known as FlowLens).

Automatic extracted and illustratively depicted Visualization of the inflow jet (arrow glyph) and impingement zone (contours) of the blood flow in a cerebral aneurysm.

The articles were published in the well-known Journal IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) and the Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing in Biology and Medicine (VCBM). The articles resulted from a close cooperation with his colleague Mathias Neugebauer, the Visual Computing group at OVGU (headed by Prof. Holger Theisel) as well as Prof. Anna Vilanova Bartroli (TU Delft) and Dr. Roy van Pelt (TU Eindhoven). Besides the work for his PhD Thesis, Rocco contributed to further topic-related publications as coauthor. Amongst others, his work was recognized by the medvis award (1st price in 2012). This award is offered by the Medical Visualization group of the German Informatics Society (GI) and is sponsored by BrainLab. Furthermore, the joint works of Mathias, Rocco, Gábor Janiga (Institute of Fluid Dynamics and Thermodynamics, OVGU), Oliver Beuing (University Hospital Magdeburg) and Prof. Bernhard Preim received the 2nd Dirk Bartz Prize for Visual Computing in Medicine at Eurographics 2013.