Browsing by Author "Garrison, Laura"

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    An Exploration of Practice and Preferences for the Visual Communication of Biomedical Processes
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Garrison, Laura; Meuschke, Monique; Fairman, Jennifer; Smit, Noeska N.; Preim, Bernhard; Bruckner, Stefan; Oeltze-Jafra, Steffen and Smit, Noeska N. and Sommer, Björn and Nieselt, Kay and Schultz, Thomas
    The visual communication of biomedical processes draws from diverse techniques in both visualization and biomedical illustration. However, matching these techniques to their intended audience often relies on practice-based heuristics or narrow-scope evaluations. We present an exploratory study of the criteria that audiences use when evaluating a biomedical process visualization targeted for communication. Designed over a series of expert interviews and focus groups, our study focuses on common communication scenarios of five well-known biomedical processes and their standard visual representations. We framed these scenarios in a survey with participant expertise spanning from minimal to expert knowledge of a given topic. Our results show frequent overlap in abstraction preferences between expert and non-expert audiences, with similar prioritization of clarity and the ability of an asset to meet a given communication objective. We also found that some illustrative conventions are not as clear as we thought, e.g., glows have broadly ambiguous meaning, while other approaches were unexpectedly preferred, e.g., biomedical illustrations in place of data-driven visualizations. Our findings suggest numerous opportunities for the continued convergence of visualization and biomedical illustration techniques for targeted visualization design.
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    MedUse: A Visual Analysis Tool for Medication Use Data in the ABCD Study
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Bartsch, Hauke; Garrison, Laura; Bruckner, Stefan; Wang, Ariel; Tapert, Susan F.; Grüner, Renate; Kozlíková, Barbora and Linsen, Lars and Vázquez, Pere-Pau and Lawonn, Kai and Raidou, Renata Georgia
    The RxNorm vocabulary is a yearly-published biomedical resource providing normalized names for medications. It is used to capture medication use in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, an active and publicly available longitudinal research study following 11,800 children over 10 years. In this work, we present medUse, a visual tool allowing researchers to explore and analyze the relationship of drug category to cognitive or imaging derived measures using ABCD study data. Our tool provides position-based context for tree traversal and selection granularity of both study participants and drug category. Developed as part of the Data Exploration and Analysis Portal (DEAP), medUse is available to more than 600 ABCD researchers world-wide. By integrating medUse into an actively used research product we are able to reach a wide audience and increase the practical relevance of visualization for the biomedical field.
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    SpectraMosaic: An Exploratory Tool for the Interactive Visual Analysis of Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Data
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Garrison, Laura; Vašíček, Jakub; Grüner, Renate; Smit, Noeska N.; Bruckner, Stefan; Kozlíková, Barbora and Linsen, Lars and Vázquez, Pere-Pau and Lawonn, Kai and Raidou, Renata Georgia
    Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) allows for assessment of tissue metabolite characteristics used often for early detection and treatment evaluation of brain-related pathologies. However, a steep learning curve for metabolite interpretation, paired with limited visualization tools, have constrained the more widespread adoption of MRS in clinical practice. In this design study, we collaborated with domain experts to design a novel visualization tool for the exploration of tissue metabolite concentration ratios in MRS clinical and research studies. We present a data and task analysis for this domain, with categorization of MRS data attributes into tiers of visual priority. We furthermore introduce a novel set of visual encodings for these attributes. Our result is SpectraMosaic (Figure 1), an interactive insight-generation tool for rapid exploration and comparison of metabolite ratios. We validate our approach with two case studies from MR spectroscopy experts, providing early qualitative evidence of the efficacy of the system and affording deeper insights into these complex data.