News

This year’s Eurographics / IEEE Symposium on Visualization (EuroVis2011) takes places in Bergen, Norway during June 1–3. With all in all 54 accepted submissions, the acceptance rate for EuroVis 2011 was a little less than 29%. We are proud to announce that our two submissions have been approved for (1.) presentation at EuroVis, and (2.) for publication in a special issue of the journal Computer Graphics Forum (CGF).

Alexandra Baer, Rocco Gasteiger, Douglas Cunningham, and Bernhard Preim, “Perceptual Evaluation of Ghosted View Techniques for the Exploration of Vascular Structures and Embedded Flow”

Mathias Neugebauer, Gabor Janiga, Oliver Beuing, Martin Skalej and Bernhard Preim, “Anatomy-Guided Multi-Level Exploration of Blood Flow in Cerebral Aneurysms”

A team consisting of our external Phd students Ivo Rössling, Jana and Lars Dornheim and our cooperation partners at the University Hospital Leipzig (Andreas Boehm) will be awarded with the Eurographics Medical Prize, named after Dirk Bartz, the pioneer of medical visualization. The work entitled “The Tumor Therapy Manager and its Clinical Impact” receives the first price. The jury honoured this work because of its nice integration of relevant techniques and its proven clinical value. The price will be given at the Eurographics main conference in April and is donated with 500 €.

Since January 3rd, Ralph Brecheisen is with the Visualization Group. Ralph is a Phd student in his final year from the Biomedical Image Analysis group in Eindhoven. Ralph is interested in DTI and uncertainty visualization in fiber tracking but also more general in quantification and 3D interaction. Ralph stays four weeks and has many discussions with all group members, in particular with Rocco and Mathias about blood flow data since there is also a lot of postprocessing involved and interaction is challenging.

The German textbook “Interaktive Systeme” is now ready and can be delivered. It is a comprehensive introductory textbook which covers basics from psychology, GUI design and information visualization with a mixture of theories, guidelines and real-world examples. The book should serve as companion material for a Bachelor course on HCI but also contains material primarily aiming at usability professionals.

Corinna Vehlow yesterday finished her study of Computational Visualistics with an excellent defense of her Master thesis “Visualization Toolkit for Contact Density Potentials within Amino Acid Neighborhoods in Protein Structures”. She carried out her Master project at the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in the Bioinformatics/Structural Proteomics group headed by Dr. Michael Lappe. Her work aims at supporting prediction of the folding of protein structures. As a prerequisite, Corinna had to dive deeply in molecular cell biology to understand the chemical and spatial structure of proteins as well as their function. She also had to understand, not only the basics, but also current research questions and to derive requirements for her tool. The core of the thesis is the design and development of a toolkit which incorporates assumptions and probabilities for interactions between amino acid residues. The 3D information was projected in a Contact Map which supports the investigations of biologists. Informal feedback of the users clearly indicates that additional insights are gained with her toolkit. A journal paper summarizing the major results is currently under review. Her thesis, written in excellent English, was graded with 1.0 from both reviewers.

With an excellent presentation Konrad nicely rounded up his Phd thesis on computer-assisted surgery. Konrad developed and refined techniques for animation, viewpoint determination and annotation of 2d slices and 3d models thus supporting the use of 3d models for surgical education and training. Together with Christian Tietjen he integrated his development in the METK – an efficient extension to Mevislab which supports the fast development of surgical applications. A major achievement of his work was the concept and realization of the LiverSurgeryTrainer – a system which directly supports the training of preoperative decisions in liver surgery based on a representative set of case data.

The commission with external reviewers Prof. Thomas Ertl and Prof. Karl-Heinz Höhne lead by Prof. Dietmar Rösner assessed his overall achievements with the best possible grade “Summa Cum Laude”.

Steffen Oeltze has defended his Phd thesis “Visual Exploration and Analysis of Perfusion Data”. Steffen dealt with the visual exploration and visual analysis of perfusion data and their applications in the diagnosis of the coronary heart disease, in breast tumor and cerebral stroke diagnosis. To tackle clinically relevant problems in a uniform way, he developed a pipeline including preprocessing, data analysis and visual exploration. Steffen has cooperated with the VRVis in Vienna and the visualization group in Bergen as well as with colleagues from Fraunhofer MEVIS . Also several clinical partners were involved in this endeavor. Specific results have been published already in IEEE TVCG and IEEE TMI as well as EuroVis. The thesis was graded with the highest possible “Summa Cum Laude”. External reviewers have been Prof. Helwig Hauser (Bergen, Norway) and Prof. Frits Post (Delft, The Netherlands) .

Christoph Russ has successfully completed his study in computational visualistics with an extraordinary master thesis on virtail endoscopy. Christoph dealt with virtual endoscopy already in the practical stage of his study where he worked in Australia on that topic.

The master thesis was accomplished at SIEMENS Corporate Research, Princeton, New Jersey and jointly supervised by Dr. Patric Ljung and Christoph Kubisch (Visualization research group, Univ. Magdeburg). In his thesis, Christoph Russ developed new methods for an automatic and realistic display of the colon wall and colon wall abnormalities for virtual colonoscopy, an endoscopic procedure to detect colon cancer at an early stage. Christoph used modern computer graphics hardware in a sophisticated manner.

The core aspects of the thesis have already been published at the well-known Volume Graphics conference, where Christoph presented the work as first author of the scientific publication. He was awarded a master degree with distinction for his extraordinary achievements.

This year’s Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing in Biology and Medicine (www.vcbm.org) takes places in Leipzig in early July. Our group will be represented with three full papers.

Alexandra and Kerstin dealt with general problems of surgical planning and developed a methodology to classify anatomic structures in focus, focus-near and context structures. This enables them to choose appropriate rendering parameters to directly support surgical questions, such as infiltration, viability of surgical removal with a security margin.

Tobias developed a new method to generate smooth and accurate surface models from segmentation results. His smoothing approach detects artifacts resulting from slices and corrects them without introducing additional errors in other portions of anatomic structures.

Rocco will present a research result from the MOBESTAN-project. He developed methods to simultaneously visualize simulated blood flow as streamlines and the anatomic context. He employed and adapted smart visibility and illustrative rendering techniques to support the interpretation of the data by clinical experts.

Der BVM-Award (Bildverarbeitung für die Medizin) wurde auf der gleichnamigen Tagung an den Magdeburger Computervisualisten Florian Wagner verliehen. Damit wird seine herausragende Diplomarbeit mit dem Thema „Verbesserung eines Systems für die Diagnose von Herdbefunden in Mammogrammen“ gewürdigt. Dabei wurde mit ausgefeilten Methoden der Bildverarbeitung versucht, die diagnostische Auswertung von Mammogrammen, also von Röntgenaufnahmen der weiblichen Brust, hinsichtlich von krebsverdächtigen Herden zu verbessern. Diese Methoden sind vor allem wichtig, um eine effiziente Früherkennung von Brustkrebs bzw. seinen Vorstufen zu erkennen. Die Diplomarbeit wurde am Fraunhofer-Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen IIS, Erlangen durchgeführt und gemeinsam von der AG Visualisierung der OvGU und der dortigen Abteilung Medizintechnik (Dr. Thomas Wittenberg) betreut. Florian Wagner ist es gelungen, dass dort bereits existierende System um wesentliche Komponenten zu erweitern, die vor allem den Rand eines verdächtigen Befundes mit komplexen mathematischen Methoden analysiert. Bei der Anwendung der Methoden auf eine große Menge „echter“ Patientendaten, bei denen eine gesicherte Diagnose vorliegt, konnte tatsächlich eine verbesserte Detektion erreicht werden. Das entwickelte System kann die Arbeit eines Radiologen sinnvoll ergänzen, indem es auf verdächtige Regionen hinweist. Eine komplett automatische Analyse ist weder möglich noch sinnvoll.