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Item Anatomy-Guided Multi-Level Exploration of Blood Flow in Cerebral Aneurysms(The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011) Neugebauer, Mathias; Janiga, Gabor; Beuing, Oliver; Skalej, Martin; Preim, Bernhard; H. Hauser, H. Pfister, and J. J. van WijkFor cerebral aneurysms, the ostium, the area of inflow, is an important anatomic landmark, since it separates the pathological vessel deformation from the healthy parent vessel. A better understanding of the inflow characteristics, the flow inside the aneurysm and the overall change of pre- and post-aneurysm flow in the parent vessel provide insights for medical research and the development of new risk-reduced treatment options. We present an approach for a qualitative, visual flow exploration that incorporates the ostium and derived anatomical landmarks. It is divided into three scopes: a global scope for exploration of the in- and outflow, an ostium scope that provides characteristics of the flow profile close to the ostium and a local scope for a detailed exploration of the flow in the parent vessel and the aneurysm. The approach was applied to five representative datasets, including measured and simulated blood flow. Informal interviews with two board-certified radiologists confirmed the usefulness of the provided exploration tools and delivered input for the integration of the ostium-based flow analysis into the overall exploration workflow.Item Adapted Surface Visualization of Cerebral Aneurysms with Embedded Blood Flow Information(The Eurographics Association, 2010) Gasteiger, Rocco; Neugebauer, Mathias; Kubisch, Christoph; Preim, Bernhard; Dirk Bartz and Charl Botha and Joachim Hornegger and Raghu Machiraju and Alexander Wiebel and Bernhard PreimCerebral aneurysms are a vascular dilatation induced by a pathological change of the vessel wall and often require treatment to avoid rupture. Therefore, it is of main interest, to estimate the risk of rupture, to gain a deeper understanding of aneurysm genesis, and to plan an actual intervention, the surface morphology and the internal blood flow characteristics. Visual exploration is primarily used to understand such complex and variable type of data. Since the blood flow data is strongly influenced by the surrounding vessel morphology both have to be visually combined to efficiently support visual exploration. Since the flow is spatially embedded in the surrounding aneurysm surface, occlusion problems have to be tackled. Thereby, a meaningful visual reduction of the aneurysm surface that still provides morphological hints is necessary. We accomplish this by applying an adapted illustrative rendering style to the aneurysm surface. Our contribution lies in the combination and adaption of several rendering styles, which allow us to reduce the problem of occlusion and avoid most of the disadvantages of the traditional semi-transparent surface rendering, like ambiguities in perception of spatial relationships. In interviews with domain experts, we derived visual requirements. Later, we conducted an initial survey with 40 participants (13 medical experts of them), which leads to further improvements of our approach.Item Effective Visual Exploration of Hemodynamics in Cerebral Aneurysms(The Eurographics Association, 2013) Neugebauer, Mathias; Gasteiger, Rocco; Janiga, Gábor; Beuing, Oliver; Preim, Bernhard; Hans-Christian Hege and Anna VilanovaCerebral aneurysms are a pathological vessel dilatation that bear a high risk of rupture. For the understanding of this risk, the analysis of hemodynamic information plays an important role in clinical research. These information are obtained by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. Thus, an effective visual exploration of patient-specific blood flow behavior in cerebral aneurysms was developed to support the domain experts in their investigation process. We present advanced visualization and interaction techniques, which provide an overview, focus-and-context views as well as multi-level explorations. Moreover, an automatic extraction process of qualitative flow characteristics, which are correlated with the risk of rupture is introduced. Although not established in clinical routine yet, interviews and informal user studies confirm the usefulness of these methods.Item Guided Analysis of Cardiac 4D PC-MRI Blood Flow Data(The Eurographics Association, 2015) Köhler, Benjamin; Preim, Uta; Grothoff, Matthias; Gutberlet, Matthias; Fischbach, Katharina; Preim, Bernhard; H.-C. Hege and T. RopinskiFour-dimensional phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (4D PC-MRI) allows the non-invasive acquisition of temporally resolved, three-dimensional blood flow information. Quantitative and qualitative data analysis helps to assess the cardiac function, severity of diseases and find indications of different cardiovascular pathologies. However, various steps are necessary to achieve expressive visualizations and reliable results. This comprises the correction of special MR-related artifacts, the segmentation of vessels, flow integration with feature extraction and the robust quantification of clinically important measures. A fast and easy-to-use processing pipeline is essential since the target user group are physicians. We present a system that offers such a guided workflow for cardiac 4D PC-MRI data. The aorta and pulmonary artery can be analyzed within ten minutes including vortex extraction and robust determination of the stroke volume as well as the percentaged backflow. 64 datasets of healthy volunteers and of patients with variable diseases such as aneurysms, coarctations and insufficiencies were processed so far.Item Viewpoint Selection for Intervention Planning(The Eurographics Association, 2007) Muehler, Konrad; Neugebauer, Mathias; Tietjen, Christian; Preim, Bernhard; K. Museth and T. Moeller and A. YnnermanViewpoint selection is crucial for medical intervention planning. The interactive exploration of a scene with 3d objects involves the systematic analysis of several anatomic structures. Viewpoint selection techniques enhance the display of the currently selected structure. For animations in collaborative intervention planning and surgical education, the authoring process may be significantly enhanced if good' viewpoints for important objects as well as for the whole scene are chosen automatically.We describe a viewpoint selection technique guided by parameters like size of unoccluded surface, importance of occluding objects, preferred region and viewpoint stability. The influence of these parameters may be flexibly adjusted by weights. Parameter maps indicate the influence of the current parameter settings on the viewpoints. For selected applications, the weights may be predefined and reused for other cases. We also describe an informal user study which was accomplished to understand if our viewpoint selection strategies produce adequate results from the users' point of view.Item Visually Guided Mesh Smoothing for Medical Applications(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Moench, Tobias; Kubisch, Christoph; Lawonn, Kai; Westermann, Ruediger; Preim, Bernhard; Timo Ropinski and Anders Ynnerman and Charl Botha and Jos RoerdinkSurface models derived from medical image data often exhibit artifacts, such as noise and staircases, which can be reduced by applying mesh smoothing filters. Usually, an iterative adaption of smoothing parameters to the specific data and continuous re-evaluation of accuracy and curvature is required. Depending on the number of vertices and the filter algorithm, computation time may vary strongly and interfere with an interactive mesh generation procedure. In this paper, we present an approach to improve the handling of mesh smoothing filters. Based on a GPU mesh smoothing implementation, model quality is evaluated in real-time and provided to the user as quality graphs to support the mental optimization of input parameters. Moreover, this framework is used to find optimal smoothing parameters automatically and to provide data-specific parameter suggestions.Item Robust Cardiac Function Assessment in 4D PC-MRI Data(The Eurographics Association, 2014) Köhler, Benjamin; Preim, Uta; Gutberlet, Matthias; Fischbach, Katharina; Preim, Bernhard; Ivan Viola and Katja Buehler and Timo RopinskiFour-dimensional phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (4D PC-MRI) is a relatively young image modality that allows the non-invasive acquisition of time-resolved, three-dimensional blood flow information. Stroke volumes and regurgitation fractions are two of the main measures to assess the cardiac function and severity of pathologies. The flow volumes in forward and backward direction through a plane inside the vessel are required for their quantification. Unfortunately, the calculations are highly sensitive towards the plane's angulation since orthogonally passing flow is considered. This often leads to physiologically implausible results. In this work, a robust quantification method is introduced to overcome this problem. Collaborating radiologists and cardiologists were carefully observed while estimating stroke volumes in various healthy volunteer and patient datasets with conventional quantification. This facilitated the automatization of their approach which, in turn, allows to derive statistical information about the plane angulation sensitivity. Moreover, the experts expect a continuous decrease of the stroke volume along the vessel course after a peak value above the aortic valve. Conventional methods are often unable to produce this behavior. Thus, we present a procedure to fit a function that ensures such physiologically plausible results. In addition, the technique was adapted for the robust quantification of regurgitation fractions. The performed qualitative evaluation shows the capability of our method to support diagnosis, a parameter evaluation confirms the robustness. Vortex flow was identified as main cause for quantification uncertainties.Item Illustrative Visualization(The Eurographics Association, 2005) Viola, Ivan; Gröller, Meister E.; Hadwiger, Markus; Bühler, Katja; Preim, Bernhard; Ebert, David; Ming Lin and Celine LoscosThe tutorial presents state-of-the-art visualization techniques inspired by traditional technical and medical illustrations. Such techniques exploit the perception of the human visual system and provide effective visual abstractions to make the visualization clearly understandable. Visual emphasis and abstraction has been used for expressive presentation from prehistoric paintings to nowadays scientific and medical illustrations. Many of the expressive techniques used in art are adopted in computer graphics, and are denoted as illustrative or non-photorealistic rendering. Different stroke techniques, or brush properties express a particular level of abstraction. Feature emphasis or feature suppression is achieved by combining different abstraction levels in illustrative rendering. Challenges in visualization research are very large data visualization as well as multi-dimensional data visualization. To effectively convey the most important visual information there is a significant need for visual abstraction. For less relevant information the dedicated image space is reduced to enhance more prominent features. The discussed techniques in the context of scientific visualization are based on iso-surfaces and volume rendering. Apart from visual abstraction, i.e., illustrative representation, the visibility of prominent features can be achieved by illustrative visualization techniques such as cut-away views or ghosted views. The structures that occlude the most prominent information are suppressed in order to clearly see more interesting parts. Another smart way to provide information on the data is using exploded views or other types of deformation. Illustrative visualization is demonstrated via application-specific tasks in medical visualization. An important aspect as compared to traditional medical illustrations is the interactivity and real-time manipulation of the acquired patient data. This can be very useful in anatomy education. Another application area is surgical planning which is demonstrated with two case studies: neck dissection and liver surgery planning.Item Comparative Evaluation of Feature Line Techniques for Shape Depiction(The Eurographics Association, 2014) Lawonn, Kai; Baer, Alexandra; Saalfeld, Patrick; Preim, Bernhard; Jan Bender and Arjan Kuijper and Tatiana von Landesberger and Holger Theisel and Philipp UrbanThis paper presents a qualitative evaluation of feature line techniques on various surfaces. We introduce the most commonly used feature lines and compare them. The techniques were analyzed with respect to the degree of realism in comparison with a shaded image with respect to the aesthetic impression they create. First, a pilot study with 20 participants was conducted to make an inquiry about their behavior and the duration. Based on the result of the pilot study, the final evaluation was carried out with 129 participants. We evaluate and interpret the trial results by using the Schulze method and give recommendations for which kind of surface, which feature line technique is most appropriate.Item Staircase-Aware Smoothing of Medical Surface Meshes(The Eurographics Association, 2010) Moench, Tobias; Adler, Simon; Preim, Bernhard; Dirk Bartz and Charl Botha and Joachim Hornegger and Raghu Machiraju and Alexander Wiebel and Bernhard PreimThe evaluation of spatial relationships between anatomic structures is a major task in surgical planning. Surface models generated from medical image data (intensity, binary) are often used for visualization and 3D measurement of extents and distances between neighboring structures. In applications for intervention or radiation treatment planning, the surface models should exhibit a natural look (referring to smoothness of the surface), but also be accurate. Smoothing algorithms allow to reduce artifacts from mesh generation, but often degrade accuracy. In particular, relevant features may be removed and distances between adjacent structures get changed. Thus, we present a modification to common mesh smoothing algorithms, which allows to focus the smoothing effect directly to previously identified staircase artifacts. This allows to preserve non-artifact features. The approach has been applied to various data to demonstrate the suitability for different anatomical shapes. The results are compared to the ones of standard uniform mesh smoothing algorithms and are evaluated regarding smoothness and accuracy with respect to the application within surgical planning.