News

Benjamin Köhler has submitted his Phd thesis on the visual exploration and analysis of cardicac blood flow. In his thesis, Ben developed BloodLine, a comprehensive tool to preprocess and visualize 4D PC-MRI data with vortex detection, robust quantification of flow features, such as flow rate. BloodLine was developed in close cooperation with the Heart center Leipzig and is regularly used there. Ben’s work is truly application-oriented and resulted in several prices including the MedVis-Award and the Eurographics Medical Price. Ben will stay with us and continue in the recently approved DFG project; extending BloodLine such that larger studies can be more efficiently analyzed.

We are very glad to announce that the German Research Foundation approved funding for our joint proposal with the Heart Center in Leipzig (Prof. Gutberlet, PD. Grothoff) and the Biometry department in Magdeburg (Prof. Kropf). The 2-year project serves as extension of our research on the visualization and analysis of cardiac blood flow measured with 4D phase-contrast MRI.

In a larger collective of patients and healthy volunteers we want to obtain an improved understanding where the boundary between physiological blood flow variations and pathologies is. The project also comprises the acquisition of patient follow-ups. Their evaluation shall help to better comprehend the evolution of the examined diseases: Bicuspid aortic valves, with a prevalence of 1-2% the most common aortic valve malformation, and tetralogy of Fallot, the most common inherited cyanotic heart disease.

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Kai Lawonn will be awarded with the Eurographics Phd Award at this year’s Eurographics main conference in May for his thesis “Illustrative Visualization of Medical Datasets”. This prestigeous price is awarded to only two researchers.

We conducted our first explorative study for our BMWi funded project Virtual Anatomy together with our project partners Dornheim Medical Images GmbH and the Institute of Anatomy.

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On February 16th and 18th, we invited ca. 20 medical students each day. After an assessment of their spatial ability, the students were split in two groups. Each group had to elaborate a medical scenario, one with an established approach, i.e., anatomy atlases, and the other with the application Dornheim Segmenter, respectively. After that, the students were tested on their abilities to label different structures on a body donor as well as recreate a medical region in a puzzle.

We thank all medical students for participation. This kind of a well planned and executed study with end users, was the first in our group. Now we are excited to analyze and interpret the results!

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Steffen Oeltze-Jafra submitted his postdoctoral lecture thesis (“Habilitation”) on “Visual Analytics of Medical and Biological Data” summarizing his work on exploring blood flow data, toponome data and data from neuro science studies. It will be the first habilitation in our group.

Ivo Rössling, external Phd candidate of our group and staff member of Dornheim Medical Images successfully defended his Phd thesis “Vermessung von medizinischen Segmentierungen für die chirurgische Interventionsplanung und Dokumentation”. Ivo was actively involved in our long term cooperation with the University hospital Leipzig, being core developer of the TumorTherapyManager that is regularly used for Tumorboard meetings.

We are very happy that Pere-Pau Vazquez (associate professor from Barcelona) visits us. Pere-Pau is an expert in viewpoint selection, volume rendering and in particular perceptual enhancements of existing techniques. We are looking forward to his talk on “Instant Visualization of Molecular Simulation”.

Noeska Smit from Delft University of Technology is with us for a 10 day stay. Noeska is a specialist in medical visualization in general and in anatomy education in particular. She gave a talk on “The Virtual Surgical Pelvis”.

Welcome to Shiva Shiva Alemzadeh, our new Phd student from Iran. Shiva will work on epidemiological data and strengthen our visual analytics branch.

Welcome to Kai Nie, our new staff member from China. Kai will work on the visual analysis of perfusion data taking into account contrast agent dynamics, morphology and texture of suspicious tumors.