News

Rocco Gasteiger submitted his Phd thesis today. Starting in 2007 and sometimes side-tracked by other projects he had to take care of, Rocco dealt with the exploration of measured and simulated blood flow data, comparing results, developing new exploration techniques, such as his FlowLens. In a close cooperation with Roy van Pelt and Anna Vilanova , Rocco developed techniques to quantify the flow with respect to the inflow jet and the impingement zone. Besides his two most essential papers that appeared at IEEE TVCG, another contribution of Rocco is extraordinary: a new approach to depict the vascular morphology and internal flow, published at the VCBM Eurographics Workshop in 2010 and being effectively the most heavily cited paper.

Kai Lawonn’s work about adaptive surface visualization of vessels with embedded blood flow has been selected as one of the three best papers in the VMV 2013 conference. The work will be presented in an extended version at Computer Graphics Forum.

We are happy that our tutorial submission entitled “Interactive Visual Analysis of Scientific Data” has been accepted as a half-day tutorial for VisWeek 2013. The tutorial is a collaborative effort of Helwig Hauser from the University of Bergen, Norway, Johannes Kehrer from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, and Steffen Oeltze (organizer). The tutorial has been held once before at VisWeek 2012. This year, the tutorial has been significantly changed, e.g., to present new application fields of Interactive Visual Analysis (IVA) to the audience: IVA of epidemiological and flow data.

We are happy that the two submissions for the SciVis conference within IEEE VisWeek (http://ieeevis.org/) were accepted for presentation.

The paper “Semi-Automatic Vortex Extraction in 4D PC-MRI Cardiac Blood Flow Data using Line Predicates” was prepared by Ben Köhler and colleagues and represents the major results of Ben’s Master thesis. Features of measured cardiac blood flow are related to severe pathologies. This work was only possible with substantial support from the Herzzentrum Leipzig (Prof. Gutberlet, Dr. Uta Preim) who provided these very special kind of data and greatly helped to interpret them and guide the analysis towards clinically relevant features.

Jan Kretschmar (SIEMENS Forchheim and Phd student in Erlangen) prepared a paper “Interactive Patient-Specific Vascular Modeling with Sweep Surfaces” on the creation of vascular surfaces models that are not only smooth and accurate but also appropriate for blood flow simulation. We could slightly contribute to Jan’s work and extend the cooperation that already lead to a EuroVis paper last year.

After the presentation at VCBM in Norrköping 2012, Tobias Mönch was invited to prepare an enhanced article for the Computer Graphics Forum on the framework for interactive mesh smoothing, primarily for anatomical surface models. After careful reviewing, the paper was now accepted and appeared online http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cgf.12165/abstract.

It represents the highlight of Tobias’ upcoming Phd thesis. The paper was joint work with Kai Lawonn, Christoph Kubisch (nVidia) and Rüdiger Westermann (TU Munich) who contributed to algorithmic descriptions and efficient hardware implementation.

Around 1300 visitors attended the “Long Night of Science” on June 1st, 2013 at the Faculty of Computer Science. Not only on June 1st, but also during the Campus Days (held on May, 31 and June, 1st), the Visualization group presented current research work on “Medical 3D Visualization and Interaction for Therapy Planning”.

We are happy to announce that members of the visualization group were awarded with the 2nd prize of the Dirk Bartz Prize for Visual Computing in Medicine 2013. The entry was titled “Interactive Visual Exploration of Hemodynamics in Cerebral Aneurysms” and it summarizes the work of Mathias Neugebauer, Rocco Gasteiger, Gabor Janiga (ISUT), Oliver Beuing (Radiology Dept. University Hospital), and Bernhard Preim. The award ceremony was part of this year’s EuroGraphics Award ceremony, in the beautiful Teatre Municipal de Girona (Girona, Spain).

Our submission “The LiverAnatomyExplorer: A WebGL-based Surgical Teaching Tool” was accepted for a special issue of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications on Web-Based 3D visualizations.

The paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a liver anatomy system that conveys different variants of the liver anatomy based on 13 datasets. 2D slice-based and 3D visualizations with a number of interaction techniques to explore the data are provided. State-of-the-art Web3D technologies and frameworks, like WebGL and X3DOM, are employed to provide a solution without any plugins. In contrast to other web-based training systems, the LiverAnatomyExplorer is based on a representative set of cases and provides more interactive features. The paper was authored by Steven Birr, Jeanette Mönch, Uta and Bernhard Preim.

We are happy that two of our submissions for the EuroVis conference in Leipzig were finally accepted and will appear in the Computer Graphics Forum.

Kai Lawonn is the principal author of the paper “Streamlines for Illustrative Real-time Rendering” where he suggests a new method to place lines on surfaces of complex (anatomical) surface models. These lines are seeded along curvature-related vector fields and provide more shape information than conventional feature lines. The line generation process, including curvature estimation, as well as the efficient rendering is described in the paper.

Mathias Neugebauer introduced “AmniVis – A System for Qualitative Exploration of Near-Wall Hemodynamics in Cerebral Aneurysms”. The paper is based on many in-depth discussions with neuroradiologists and aims to present results of unsteady (time-dependent) CFD simulations intuitively and effectively. Essential questions, guiding this research, are: How can the user efficiently select relevant time steps? What features are particularly interesting? How they can be emphasized and assessed?

Die Arbeitsgruppe “Medizinische Visualisierung” an der Universität Magdeburg feiert ihr 10-jähriges Bestehen. Aus diesem Anlass wird es am 26. April 2013 ab 15 Uhr im Hörsaal der Fakultät für Informatik (G29-307) ein Symposium geben, bei dem ein kleiner Einblick in die vergangenen 10 Jahre und in die Arbeiten der Arbeitsgruppe, ehemaliger Mitarbeiter und eng verbundener Partner gegeben wird.