Eurographics 2006 - Conference Webpage

T11Illustrative Visualization for Medicine and Science

Image for Illustrative Visualization for Medicine and Science

Date:	Tuesday, 5th September
Time:	14:00-17:30
Location:	Tutorial Room 6 (HS 6)

Organizer

Ivan Viola, Technical University of Vienna
Mario Costa Sousa, University of Calgary
David S. Ebert, Purdue University

Speakers

Bill Andrews, Medical College of Georgia
David S. Ebert, Purdue University
Bruce Gooch, Northwestern University
Bernhard Preim, University of Magdeburg
Mario Costa Sousa, University of Calgary
Nikolai Svakhine, Purdue University
Christian Tietjen, University of Magdeburg
Ivan Viola, Vienna University of Technology

Abstract

This tutorial presents recent and important research and developments from academia in illustrative, non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) focusing on its use for medical/science subjects. Lectures are organized within a comprehensive illustration framework, focusing on three main components:

Traditional and computerized illustration techniques and principles for Technical and Science Subjects
Viewing & Rendering
Evaluation and Practical Use

Presentation of topics is balanced between descriptions of traditional methods and practices, practical implementation motivated approaches and evaluation, and detailed descriptions and analysis of NPR techniques and algorithms. We begin with a lecture presenting an overview of traditional illustration in technical, science, and medical subjects followed by a description of the main components in a NPR pipeline for developing systems to help technical and science illustrators with their work. The tutorial progresses with an overview of the NPR used in illustration as well as approaches to evaluate their use and effectiveness. We continue with viewing and rendering section describing the latest techniques in computerized illustration algorithms for scientific and medical data for both surface and volumetric data, covering techniques from silhouette enhancement to stippling, to cut-away viewing, labeling, and focus+context rendering. Each of the lectures also discusses practical issues in making these techniques interactive and their use for different application domains. Tutorial concludes with discussion on specific medical case studies where the illustrative visualization has been effectively applied.

Speakers' Background

Bill Andrews: Bill Andrews received his BA in Art in 1978 from the University of Texas at Austin and his MA in Biomedical Communications in 1980 from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Dallas. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Health Promotion, Education and Behavior at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. Bill began his professional career as a medical illustrator at the University of Arizona Health Science Center at Tucson before moving to Houston, Texas in 1981. He worked in varying capacities in the Texas Medical Center, including as Art Director for the Texas Heart Institute and as Manager of Medical Illustration & Graphic Design Services at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. He was honored to join the MCG faculty in 1999. He currently serves as Education Program Coordinator, Gallery Director and Webmaster.
Bill has won numerous professional awards and has had works included in juried exhibits around the world. Bill has presented numerous seminars and workshops across the United States and in Canada, France, Italy and the Netherlands. He has been an active Professional member of the Association of Medical Illustrators since 1982. He has served as President of the AMI and on the Board of Governors, and is a Fellow of the AMI. Bill has been Editor of the national newsletter and is currently the Editor for the Source Book of Medical Illustration. He has been recognized as a Certified Medical Illustrator since 1993. In 1988, Bill became the founding President of the Vesalius Trust, an educational foundation supporting research and education in visual communications for the health sciences.
David S. Ebert: David Ebert is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University and directs both the Purdue University Rendering and Perceptualization Lab and the Purdue University Regional Visualization and Analytics Center. His research interests are scientific, medical, and information visualization, computer graphics, animation, and procedural techniques. Dr. Ebert performs research in volume rendering, illustrative visualization, realistic rendering, procedural texturing, modeling, and animation, and modeling natural phenomena. Ebert was one of creators of the subfield of illustrative visualization, applying the principles of illustration to the problem of visualizing scientific data. Ebert has been very active in the graphics community, teaching courses, presenting papers, serving on and co-chairing many conference program committees, serving on the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee and serving as Editor in Chief for IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Ebert is also editor and co-author of the seminal text on procedural techniques in computer graphics, Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach, whose third edition was published in December 2003.
Bruce Gooch: Bruce Gooch is a professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Northwestern University. Illustrative Visualization, the research of Professor Gooch, combines computer graphics techniques for creating artistic imagery with the evaluation methods of perceptual psychology to provide effective data visualization. Gooch is the author of over twenty research papers in the areas of computer graphics and visualization. He is also a coauthor of the books "Non Photorealistic Rendering" and "Illustrative Visualization" published by A.K. Peters. Gooch has taught courses at SIGGRAPH 1999, 2002 and 2003 as well as an NPR course for Disney feature films.
Bernhard Preim: Bernhard Preim worked for four years as project leader Surgery planning at the Center for Medical Visualization and Diagnostic Systems (MeVis Bremen, Germany) before he was appointed as full professor for visualization at the computer science department at the Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg, Germany. His research group focusses on medical visualization and specific applications in surgical education and surgery planning. He is speaker of the working group Medical Visualization in the German Society for Computer Science. He is member of the scientific advisary boards of ICCAS (International Competence Center on Computer-Assisted Surgery Leipzig, since 2003) and CURAC (German Society for Computer- and Roboter-assisted Surgery, since 2004) and Visiting Professor at the University of Bremen. He is author and coauthor of more than 80 publications, most of them dealing with interactive visualizations in medical applications. His research interests include 3D interaction techniques, visualization techniques for medical volume data (visualization of vasculature, transfer function design, illustrative medical visualization) and computer support for medical diagnosis and treatment planning, in particular neck dissection planning and liver surgery planning.
Mario Costa Sousa: Mario Costa Sousa is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary and coordinator of the Render Group, the Illustrative Visualization/NPR research wing at the Computer Graphics Lab at the University of Calgary. He holds a M.Sc. (PUC-Rio, Brazil) and a Ph.D. (University of Alberta) both in Computer Science. His current focus is on research and development of techniques to capture the enhancement and expressive capability of traditional illustrations, leading to a comprehensive formal illustrative visualization framework, methodology and software environment for computer-generated medical and scientific illustrations. This work involves topics centered on interactive modeling, shape analysis and expressive rendering for illustrative volume visualization and interactive simulations. Dr. Sousa has active collaborations with illustrative visualization research groups, medical centers, scientific institutes and with illustrators/studios affiliated with the Association of Medical Illustrators and the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators.
Nikolai Svakhine: Nikolai Svakhine is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Purdue University and will finish his dissertation on interactive medical and flow illustration in December 2006. His research interests include computer graphics and scientific visualization, in application to medical illustration and flow visualization. Svakhine has a BS in computational mathematics from Moscow State University, Russia, and an MS in computer science from Purdue University.
Christian Tietjen: Christian Tietjen is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the Otto-von-Guericke- University of Magdeburg, Germany. His research focuses on illustrative medical visualization. In detail, he tries to combine different rendering styles like silhouettes, surface and volume rendering. Furthermore, he is working on synchronized 2D and 3D visualizations. He is currently developing visualization techniques for preoperative planning systems. Tietjen is author and co-author of some publications, for instance at the EuroVis and the IEEE Visualization.
Ivan Viola: Ivan Viola graduated in 2002 from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria with a MSc in the field of computer graphics and visualization. He received his PhD in 2005 for his thesis "Importance-Driven Expressive Visualization". Currently he is managing the ExVisation research project focusing on development of novel methods for automatically generating expressive visualizations of complex data. Viola co-authored several scientific works published on international conferences such as IEEE Visualization, EuroVis, and Vision Modeling and Visualization and acted as a reviewer for conferences in the field of computer graphics and visualization. He is also co-organizing series of tutorials on Illustrative Visualization, presented at various computer graphics and visualization conferences.