Monique Meuschke’s PhD Thesis was selected by the senate of the Otto von Guericke University as the best PhD Thesis of the whole university. Monique will be awarded a price at the Academic Ceremony at the Johannis Church in November.
We contributed to the tutorial Augmented and Virtual Reality at the CARS conference in Rennes (with Roy Eagleson, George Hattab and Ulrich Eck). Our contribution was on perceptual foundations.
Monique Meuschke has finished her excellent Phd thesis on computer-assisted exploration of cerebral bloodflow with an outstanding defense. Monique developed a set of tools, integrated in an overall framework, that supports the analysis of scalar, vector and tensor data resulting from CFD simulations. Variants of the flow, e.g. after simulated treatment with different devices can be compared. A special tool enables to cluster the (time-dependent) flow, to map it to a half sphere and finally to classify it according to known flow patterns that impose a different rupture risk. Monique was extraordinarily active in publishing her results leading to 3 IEEE TVCG papers and another 7 journal papers that appeared in the Computer Graphics Forum, IEEE CG&A and Computers & Graphics.
In her dissertation she supported the entire workflow of evaluation with powerful tools. The methods are consistently tailored to the needs of medical researchers and fluid scientists and enable a better understanding of the complex simulation results. Among other things, their tools make it possible to analyze and abstract the blood flow and to classify it by means of an automated comparison with known flow patterns. In her doctoral phase, which lasted only 3.5 years, she summarized these papers in 10 journal publications, of which she is the first author of 7 of these publications. After an outstanding defense, her dissertation was awarded Summa Cum Laude.
The Interdisciplinary Symposium for Women in the MINT Field (ISINA) took place at the TU Chemnitz on 25-26 March. The ISINA symposium is a platform for knowledge transfer and exchange on topics such as interdisciplinary research, success strategies as well as for passing on impulses for innovative forms of work. On two days, experts from science and business gave lectures on current topics from science and research. Embedded in the first day was the presentation of the nationwide ISINA “Best Poster Awards”. Here, posters were awarded that present the research subjects of bachelor’s and master’s theses as well as doctorates in a generally understandable way. Monique Meuschke applied for this prize with her doctoral thesis entitled “Visualization, Classification and Interactive Exploration of Risk Criteria for Cerebral Aneurysms”. Her submission was awarded with the 1st place.
Patrick Saalfeld successfully defended his Phd thesis entitled „3D User Interfaces for Interventional Support and Medical Education“. Patrick made a number of contributions to sketch-based interface, gesture interaction and stereoscopic interaction in semi-immersive and immersive settings aiming at anatomy education, patient education and treatment planning. After the official part, the traditional ceremony at the Otto-von-Guericke monument was a nice round up.
This years IEEE Vis. conference, the first in Germany is a great opportunity to present and discuss our work.
Monique Meuschke presents three papers all related to the analysis of simulated cerebral blood flow in aneurysms. Her fist paper “Management of Cerebral Aneurysm Descriptors based on an Automatic Ostium Extraction“ deals with the extraction of morphological descriptors, e.g. the ostium plane, and the management of all derived information in a database to support the analysis of whole cohorts and eventually more objective treatment decisions.
Her second paper “Visual Analysis of Aneurysm Data using Statistical Graphics” describes a framework for the exploration of multiple scalar fields, e.g. pressure and shear indices, to understand the mutual influence of two scalar fields. Regions with striking fluid-wall interactions thus become obvious. The relevance of these regions is that they are potential rupture sites. The particular challenge in this work is to cope with the dynamic changes of these values over the cardiac cycle. Both papers are results of cooperations with Kai Lawonn (Univ. Koblenz-Landau), ETH Zürich and physicians from Herz-Jesu-Krankhaus Dernbach.
Moniques‘ last paper deals with the analysis of characteristic flow patterns in aneurysms. Medical research showed that some flow patterns are related to a higher risk of rupture. Monique and Kai came up with a formal description of such flow patterns and automatic methods to classify the flow accordingly. Clustering of the pathlines representing the spatio-temporal character of the flow leads to a more abstract and aggregated flow description. Cluster representatives are then mapped to a half sphere that serves as a geometry to compare the flow in saccular aneurysms around a large number of patients. With an appropriate distance metric, the flow then can be classified according to the predefined flow patterns. Cooperation partners in this work are ICCAS Leipzig and the Univ. hospital Magdeburg.
Finally, Gabriel Mistelbauer presents Popup-Plots, a visualization approach that he designed and developed together with Johanna Schmidt from AIT Austria. The paper deals with the visualization of temporal data, but uses an ellipsoidal coordinate system instead of a conventional Cartesian one. By rotating around the data, the space is bent to successively view more time and the visualization comes out of the image plane. Gabriel Mistelbauer and Johanna Schmidt will also hold a workshop on visual summarization and report generation.
Negar Chabi, our new Phd student arrived from Iran. She will carry out research on stent detection and stent enhancement in medical image data as part of the Graduate School Memorial.
On October 12, 2018, the kick-off meeting for the new BMBF-funded project AVATAR took place at the Faculty of Computer Science at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. Under the direction of Jun.-Prof. Dr. Christian Hansen, AVATAR will investigate new interaction and visualization techniques for virtual training of surgeons. The University Hospital Mainz, the Harvard Medical School in Boston, the research campus STIMULATE and the companies metratec and 2tainment are involved as project partners. The project will be funded by the BMBF with 1.6 million euros over the next three years.
Bernhard Preim was part of a well-attended MICCAI tutorial “Blending Visualization with Data Mining and Machine Learning for Biomedical Data Analysis”.
The Vis. group was present at VCBM/MICCAI in Granada with active participation in tutorials, four talks and a poster at VCBM. Gabriel Mistelbauer received the “Best Short Paper Award” for the paper “Visual Assessment of Vascular Torsion using Ellipse Fitting”, a cooperation with Fraunhofer IFF Magdeburg. Monique Meuschke received the “Best Poster Award” for a creative poster summarizing her Phd work. The papers are online at our publication page.
