Scenarios for Narrative Visualization of Medical 3D Datasets
Topic: Raw medical image data is hard to interpret for non-experts. However, to communicate medical topics visualization can help a lot. Therefore, this project strives to find appropriate visualization techniques to make medical image data accessible to the broad public. Different visualization techniques should be investigated regarding degrees of interactivity, animation, annotations, etc.
Project Type: There are different possible scenarios, each scenario can be a separate student project. A project can be a Bachelor/Master Thesis, Team project, or Individual project.
Requirements: The project will be done with the Unity Engine (using C# Scripts). Experience with Unity is beneficial but not obligatory. Programming skills in C# or a similar language as well as knowledge of basic computer graphics or visualization are required. Prior knowledge in medical visualization is beneficial but not obligatory.
Scenario 1: Nested Structures
In many cases, the infected tissue lies within healthy tissue. We have to visualize these nested surfaces to not just show the infected tissue but to also provide anatomical context
- Medical Examples:
- Liver Tumor
- Brain Lesions
- Main Tasks: Implement and Compare Visualization Techniques, e.g.
- Transparent Surfaces
- Clipping Plane
- Cut-a-way-views
- Illustrative Techniques
Scenario 2: Compare Data Sets
Some diseases might not be obvious to non-experts because they don’t know how the healthy anatomical structures look like. Therefore, a comparative visualization of multiple data sets can support their understanding.
- Medical Examples:
- Aneurysm before and after stent
- Main Tasks: Investigate Techniques to Compare Multiple Data Sets
- Visualization techniques (see Scenario 1) that are suited for comparisons
- Techniques to link multiple visualizations together
Scenario 4: Blood Flow
Visualizing blood flow is important for the explanation of many vascular diseases. However, blood flow can be very complex and it can be tricky to depict different streams inside a vessel without confusing non-experts.
- Medical Examples:
- Flow inside an aneurysm
- Flow inside the aorta
- Main Task: Implement and Compare Flow Visualization Techniques
- Vessel Wall Depictions
- Depict Flow as Particles, Lines, …
- (Color Choices)
Scenario 5: Functional Data
Medical visualization includes not only the representation of anatomical structures, but also functional data that is mapped to the anatomical surfaces.
- Medical Examples:
- Wall shear stress caused by blood flow
- (Blood flow velocity)
- Main Tasks: Implement and Compare Visualization Techniques for Functional Data
- Different Methods for Color-coding
- Legends
- Glyphs (e.g. like in a weather map)
