VCBM 19: Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/2632802

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Browsing VCBM 19: Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine by Subject "Life and medical sciences"

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    InkVis: A High-Particle-Count Approach for Visualization of Phase-Contrast Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) de Hoon, Niels; Lawonn, Kai; Jalba, Andrei; Eisemann, Elmar; Vilanova, Anna; Kozlíková, Barbora and Linsen, Lars and Vázquez, Pere-Pau and Lawonn, Kai and Raidou, Renata Georgia
    Phase-Contrast Magnetic Resonance Imaging (PC-MRI) measures volumetric and time-varying blood flow data, unsurpassed in quality and completeness. Such blood-flow data have been shown to have the potential to improve both diagnosis and risk assessment of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) uniquely. Typically PC-MRI data is visualized using stream- or pathlines. However, time-varying aspects of the data, e.g., vortex shedding, breakdown, and formation, are not sufficiently captured by these visualization techniques. Experimental flow visualization techniques introduce a visible medium, like smoke or dye, to visualize flow aspects including time-varying aspects. We propose a framework that mimics such experimental techniques by using a high number of particles. The framework offers great flexibility which allows for various visualization approaches. These include common traditional flow visualizations, but also streak visualizations to show the temporal aspects, and uncertainty visualizations. Moreover, these patient-specific measurements suffer from noise artifacts and a coarse resolution, causing uncertainty. Traditional flow visualizations neglect uncertainty and, therefore, may give a false sense of certainty, which can mislead the user yielding incorrect decisions. Previously, the domain experts had no means to visualize the effect of the uncertainty in the data. Our framework has been adopted by domain experts to visualize the vortices present in the sinuses of the aorta root showing the potential of the framework. Furthermore, an evaluation among domain experts indicated that having the option to visualize the uncertainty contributed to their confidence on the analysis.
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    Interactive Formation of Statistical Hypotheses in Diffusion Tensor Imaging
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Abbasloo, Amin; Wiens, Vitalis; Schmidt-Wilcke, Tobias; Sundgren, Pia; Klein, Reinhard; Schultz, Thomas; Kozlíková, Barbora and Linsen, Lars and Vázquez, Pere-Pau and Lawonn, Kai and Raidou, Renata Georgia
    When Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is used in clinical studies, statistical hypothesis testing is the standard approach to establish significant differences between groups, such as patients and healthy controls. However, diffusion tensors contain six degrees of freedom, and the most commonly used univariate tests reduce them to a single scalar, such as Fractional Anisotropy. Multivariate tests that account for the full tensor information have been developed, but have not been widely adopted in practice. Based on analyzing the limitations of existing univariate and multivariate tests, we argue that it is beneficial to use a more flexible, steerable test. Therefore, we introduce a test that can be customized to include any subset of tensor attributes that are relevant to the analysis task at hand. We also present a visual analytics system that supports the exploratory task of customizing it to a specific scenario. Our system closely integrates quantitative analysis with suitable visualizations. It links spatial and abstract views to reveal clusters of strong differences, to relate them to the affected anatomical structures, and to visually compare the results of different tests. A use case is presented in which our system leads to the formation of several new hypotheses about the effects of systemic lupus erythematosus on water diffusion in the brain.
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    Using Position-Based Dynamics for Simulating the Mitral Valve in a Decision Support System
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Walczak, Lars; Georgii, Joachim; Tautz, Lennart; Neugebauer, Mathias; Wamala, Isaac; Sündermann, Simon; Falk, Volkmar; Hennemuth, Anja; Kozlíková, Barbora and Linsen, Lars and Vázquez, Pere-Pau and Lawonn, Kai and Raidou, Renata Georgia
    In mitral valve interventions, surgeons have to select an optimal combination of techniques for every patient. Especially less experienced physicians would benefit from decision support for this process. To support the visual analysis of the patientspecific valvular dynamics and an in-silico pre-intervention simulation of different therapy options, a real-time simulation of the mitral valve is needed, especially for the use in a time-constrained clinical environment. We develop a simplified model of the mitral valve and propose a novel approach to simulate the mitral valve with position-based dynamics. As input, a mesh representation of the open-state mitral valve, two polygons representing the open and closed annulus states, simplified chordae tendineae, and a set of forces for approximating the surrounding blood are required. The mitral valve model can be deformed to simulate the closing and opening as well as incorporate changes caused by virtual interventions in the simulation. For evaluation, ten mitral valves were reconstructed from transesophageal echocardiogram sequences of patients with normal and abnormal physiology. Experts in cardiac surgery annotated anatomical landmarks for valve reconstruction. The simulation results for closing the valve were qualitatively compared to the anatomy depicted in the image sequences and, if present, the reproduction of a prolapse was verified. In addition, two virtual interventions (annuloplasty and clipping) were performed for one case and provided new insights about changes in valve closure and orifice area after modification. Each simulation ran at interactive frame rates. Our approach enables an efficient simulation of the mitral valve with normal and abnormal valve closing behavior as well as virtual interventions. The simulation results showed good agreements with the image data in general and reproduced valve closure in all cases. In three cases, prolapse was not or not correctly reproduced. Further research is needed to parameterize the model in pathologic cases.