News

AVATAR kick-off meeting

By / April 9, 2021

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.

VCBM/MICCAI 2018

By / April 9, 2021

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.

PhD Thesis submitted

By / April 9, 2021

Patrick Saalfeld has submitted his Phd thesis “3D User Interfaces for Interventional Support and Medical Education” summarizing his work on spatial interaction techniques and devices to support medical treatment planning and education. The developed interaction techniques used on immersive systems resulted in several prices including the Eurographics Medical Price, MedVis-Award and the ElbeDome Award. Patrick’s work was funded by a fellowship from Sachsen-Anhalt and within the BMWi project “Virtual Anatomy”.

Held der Lehre

By / April 9, 2021

Nico Merten was given the “Held der Lehre” Award for his excercise on “Information Visualization” in Summer term 2017 by the Faculties’ student organization.

2nd Price ElbeDome Award

By / April 9, 2021

On May, 24th the ElbeDome (Europe’s largest 3D mixed reality laboratory) was reopened after modernization. For this event, applications demonstrating the capabilities of the ElbeDome could be submitted. The team of Benjamin Behrendt, Lisa Piotrowski, and Patrick Saalfeld (alphabetical order) developed the VR application “Inside Circulus arteriosus”. Here, the user is able to explore the Circle of Willis comprising its arteries, blood flow and surrounding skull. Their submission was awarded with the 2nd place.

Foto: Victoria Kühne / Fraunhofer IFF

GEPARD – Vessel Wall Simulation and Visualization for Patient-Specific Blood Flow Prediction for Intracranial Aneurysm Modeling

By / April 9, 2021


We gladly announce the German Research Foundation (DFG) approval for our GEPARD (GEfäßwandsimulation und -visualisierung zur Patientenindividualisierten Blutflussvorhersage für die intrakranielle AneuRysmamoDellierung) proposal. The project was developed by Dr.-Ing. Sylvia Saalfeld and Dr.-Ing. Philipp Berg. The 3-year project comprises two PhD-positions and aims at blood flow simulation and visualization of patient-specific intracranial aneurysms. Intracranial aneurysms and their associated rupture risk have been active research areas of both applicants for the last years. With the GEPARD project, especially the morphology of the intracranial vessel wall and its influence on the subsequent blood flow simulation will be examined. Furthermore, the extravascular space will be incorporated into the analyses as well. The project will be carried out in close cooperation with the neuroradiology department of the university hospital Magdeburg and will be integrated into the Forschungscampus STIMULATE.

2nd Price MedVis Award and presentation in Ulm

By / April 9, 2021

A team lead by Patrick Saalfeld recieved the 2nd price of the MedVis-Award (Karl-Heinz-Höhne Award). The price was handed over at the annual meeting of the VCBM working group. The succesful contribution demonstrates how vascular structures and annotations can be sketched interactively to support treamtent planning and medical education. The sketching is performed with the semi-immersive zSpace. Benjamin Behrendt presented his latest work regarding the explorative visualization of cerebral and cardiac bloodflow data at the same meeting.

Funding for 10 Head-worn Displays for collaborative VR research

By / April 9, 2021

We installed 10 HTC Vives that allow several users to interact in a shared virtual environment simultaneously. We will use this setup for collaborative VR research and to support lectures and student projects of our faculty with hands-on demonstrations of spatial interaction. The equipment is funded by an internal grant from the Faculty of Computer Science at the Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg.

Cardio Diagnostic Days

By / April 9, 2021

We presented a VR prototype at the German Cardio Diagnostic Days in Leipzig, organized by our clinical collaborators Matthias Gutberlet and Matthias Grothoff. The VR protoype is currently extended together with paediatric cardiologist in Dallas, USA. It allows to explore healthy and pathological heart conditions that eventually can support treatment planning and patient education. The feedback the physicians gave us was very positive.

Benjamin Köhler gave a talk about 4D PC MRI data evaluation, demonstrating the analysis of blood flow patterns in the aorta and pulmonal artery with his research software “Bloodline”.