VCBM 18: Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine

Permanent URI for this collection

https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/2632660

Browse

Browsing VCBM 18: Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine by Subject "Computing methodologies"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Automatic Generation of Web-Based User Studies to Evaluate Depth Perception in Vascular Surface Visualizations
    (The Eurographics Association, 2018) Meuschke, Monique; Smit, Noeska N.; Lichtenberg, Nils; Preim, Bernhard; Lawonn, Kai; Puig Puig, Anna and Schultz, Thomas and Vilanova, Anna and Hotz, Ingrid and Kozlikova, Barbora and Vázquez, Pere-Pau
    User studies are often required in biomedical visualization application papers in order to provide evidence for the utility of the presented approach. An important aspect is how well depth information can be perceived, as depth encoding is important to enable an understandable representation of complex data. Unfortunately, in practice there is often little time available to perform such studies, and setting up and conducting user studies may be labor-intensive. In addition, it can be challenging to reach enough participants to support the contribution claims of the paper. In this paper, we propose a system that allows biomedical visualization researchers to quickly generate perceptual task-based user studies for novel surface visualizations, and to perform the resulting experiment via a web interface. This approach helps to reduce effort in the setup of user studies themselves, and at the same time leverages a web-based approach that can help researchers attract more participants to their study. We demonstrate our system using the specific application of depth judgment tasks to evaluate vascular surface visualizations, since there is a lot of recent interest in this area. However, the system is also generally applicable for conducting other task-based user studies in biomedical visualization.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Improving Perception of Molecular Surface Visualizations by Incorporating Translucency Effects
    (The Eurographics Association, 2018) Hermosilla, Pedro; Maisch, Sebastian; Vázquez, Pere-Pau; Ropinski, Timo; Puig Puig, Anna and Schultz, Thomas and Vilanova, Anna and Hotz, Ingrid and Kozlikova, Barbora and Vázquez, Pere-Pau
    Molecular surfaces are a commonly used representation in the analysis of molecular structures as they provide a compact description of the space occupied by a molecule and its accessibility. However, due to the high abstraction of the atomic data, fine grain features are hard to identify. Moreover, these representations involve a high degree of occlusions, which prevents the identification of internal features and potentially impacts shape perception. In this paper, we present a set of techniques which are inspired by the properties of translucent materials, that have been developed to improve the perception of molecular surfaces: First, we introduce an interactive algorithm to simulate subsurface scattering for molecular surfaces, in order to improve the thickness perception of the molecule. Second, we present a technique to visualize structures just beneath the surface, by still conveying relevant depth information. And lastly, we introduce reflections and refractions into our visualization that improve the shape perception of molecular surfaces. We evaluate the benefits of these methods through crowd-sourced user studies as well as the feedback from several domain experts.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A New Vessel Enhancement Transform on Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation
    (The Eurographics Association, 2018) Soares, Ivo; Castelo-Branco, Miguel; Pinheiro, António M. G.; Puig Puig, Anna and Schultz, Thomas and Vilanova, Anna and Hotz, Ingrid and Kozlikova, Barbora and Vázquez, Pere-Pau
    The automatic detection of retinal blood vessels is a very important task in computer aided-diagnosis of retinal diseases. In this work a new method is proposed for the automated detection of the retinal vessels. Three new and important contributions are made. First, a new method capable of vessel enhancement is presented. Second, a new criterium to remove some false vessels caused by the proximity to bright regions is presented, avoiding the false vessels created by the presence of exudates or bright artifacts. Third, a new method that discards the false vessel regions that usually tends to appear in the border of the optic disc. This is achieved using the derivatives of the gradient magnitude local maxima over different scales. The performance evaluation is made on two publicly available databases, namely, STARE, and HRF with state-of-the-art results. Particularly, the described method reveals to be very reliable on retinal images with large pathological signs.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Parameterization and Feature Extraction for the Visualization of Tree-like Structures
    (The Eurographics Association, 2018) Lichtenberg, Nils; Lawonn, Kai; Puig Puig, Anna and Schultz, Thomas and Vilanova, Anna and Hotz, Ingrid and Kozlikova, Barbora and Vázquez, Pere-Pau
    The study and visualization of vascular structures, using 3D models obtained from medical data, is an active field of research. Illustrative visualizations have been applied to this domain in multiple ways. Researchers have tried to make the geometric properties of vasculature more comprehensive and to augment the surface with representations of multivariate clinical data. Techniques that head beyond the application of color-maps or simple shading approaches require a sort of surface parameterization, i.e., texture coordinates, in order to overcome locality. When extracting 3D models, the computation of texture coordinates on the mesh is not always part of the data processing pipeline. We combine existing techniques to a simple, yet effective, parameterization approach that is suitable for tree-like structures. The parameterization is done w.r.t. to a pre-defined source vertex. For this, we present an automatic algorithm, that detects the root of a tree-structure. The parameterization is partly done in screen-space and recomputed per frame. However, the screen-space computation comes with positive features that are not present in object-space approaches. We show how the resulting texture coordinates can be used for varying hatching, contour parameterization, the display of decals, as an additional depth cue and feature extraction.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Visual Assessment of Vascular Torsion using Ellipse Fitting
    (The Eurographics Association, 2018) Mistelbauer, Gabriel; Zettwitz, Martin; Schernthaner, Rüdiger; Fleischmann, Dominik; Teutsch, Christian; Preim, Bernhard; Puig Puig, Anna and Schultz, Thomas and Vilanova, Anna and Hotz, Ingrid and Kozlikova, Barbora and Vázquez, Pere-Pau
    Blood vessels are well explored and researched in medicine and visualization. However, the investigation of vascular torsion has yet been unexplored. In order to understand the development and current state of a single blood vessel or even multiple connected ones, properties of vascular structures have to be analyzed. In this paper we assess the torsion of blood vessels in order to better understand their morphology. The aim of this work is to quantitatively gauge blood vessels by using an automated method that assumes an elliptical blood vessel model. This facilitates using state-of-the-art ellipse fitting algorithms from industrial measuring standards. In order to remove outliers, we propose a self-correcting iterative refitting of ellipses using neighboring information. The torsion information is visually conveyed by connecting the major and minor points of adjacent ellipses. Our final visualization comprises a visual representation of the blood vessel including four bands to outline the torsion.