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Item A Critical Analysis of the Evaluation Practice in Medical Visualization(The Eurographics Association, 2018) Preim, Bernhard; Ropinski, Timo; Isenberg, Petra; Puig Puig, Anna and Schultz, Thomas and Vilanova, Anna and Hotz, Ingrid and Kozlikova, Barbora and Vázquez, Pere-PauMedical visualization aims at directly supporting physicians in diagnosis and treatment planning, students and residents in medical education, and medical physicists as well as other medical researchers in answering specific research questions. For assessing whether single medical visualization techniques or entire medical visualization systems are useful in this respect, empirical evaluations involving participants from the target user group are indispensable. The human computer interaction field developed a wide range of evaluation instruments, and the information visualization community more recently adapted and refined these instruments for evaluating (information) visualization systems. However, often medical visualization lacks behind and should pay more attention to evaluation, in particular to evaluations in realistic settings that may assess how visualization techniques contribute to cognitive activities, such as deciding about a surgical strategy or other complex treatment decisions. In this vein, evaluations that are performed over a longer period are promising to study, in order to investigate how techniques are adapted. In this paper, we discuss the evaluation practice in medical visualization based on selected examples and contrast these evaluations with the broad range of existing empirical evaluation techniques. We would like to emphasize that this paper does not serve as a general call for evaluation in medical visualization, but argues that the individual situation must be assessed and that evaluations when they are carried out should be done more carefully.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-PauMolecular 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.