Application Spotlights

Accepted Application Spotlights

Here is the list of the accepted Spotlights. Please visit their individual websites for details on the topics and submission deadlines, or contact the organizers directly if no website is available yet.

Challenges in the Visualization of Bioelectric Fields for Cardiac and Neural Research

When: TBD

Organizers

Prof. Rob MacLeod, SCI Institute, Biomedical Engineering, University of Utah
Bei Wang, School of Computing, SCI Institute, University of Utah
Wilson W. Good, SCI Institute, Biomedical Engineering, University of Utah

Contact: wilsonwgood@gmail.com

Summary

The visualization of bioelectric fields has been an ongoing challenge to cardiac and neural researchers. Bioelectrical field data are heterogeneous and their interpretation often requires simultaneous interrogation of anatomical information with measured or simulated scalar, vector, and tensor fields. They may be volumetric or constrained to (obscuring) surfaces; and are usually time-dependent. To fully understand the spatiotemporal dynamics of the pathology under study, it is often necessary to integrate diverse formation across multiple scales, and to quantify and visualize the uncertainty associated with the data. Unfortunately, few visualization approaches are catered to the needs, conventions, and language of the applications, leading to a lack of widespread standards and use. Addressing these visualization challenges has potentially far-reaching benefits to both the understanding and diagnosis of a number of diseases.

The 90-minute session will be split between a single 30-minute plenary talk given by Dr. Rob S. MacLeod with experience in cardiac and neural analysis and visualization to outline the challenges facing the field. The plenary talk will be followed by three 15-minute talks from specialists from across the country who will outline their specific applications and visualization challenges.

Speakers

Dr. Rob S. MacLeod - SCI Institute, University of Utah - Rob MacLeod was trained in physics, electrical engineering, and physiology & biophysics and is a full professor of Bioengineering and Internal Medicine (Cardiology) at the University of Utah. He is a co-founder and Associate Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute and holds a similar position at the Nora Eccles Harrison Cardiovascular Research and Training Institute (CVRTI). He also co-founded the Consortium for ECG Imaging. He is Vice Chair and Director of the Undergraduate program in Biomedical Engineering. His research interests include computational electrocardiography with special interest in simulating bioelectric fields, e.g., from cardiac defibrillation and neuromodulation, and exploring new approaches for electrocardiographic imaging (ECGI) He also uses experimental investigation and clinical approaches to improve management of ventricular and atrial arrhythmias and acute myocardial ischemia. For his research, he uses a broad range of techniques including scientific computing, imaging, image and signal processing, and visualization.

Dr. Sumientra Rampersad - Northeastern University - Sumientra Rampersad is a Research Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston. She was trained in biochemistry, biophysics, neuroscience and biomedical engineering, and received a PhD in Medical Sciences. Her main research goals are to better understand the working mechanisms behind noninvasive brain stimulation in humans and to improve its application. For her research, she uses finite element simulations with detailed human head models, and experiments with healthy volunteers, for which she uses cognitive tests, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and electroencephalography (EEG) to measure stimulation effects. She focuses on transcranial current stimulation (tCS), including direct (tDCS), alternating (tACS) and temporal interference (tTIS) stimulation, but her research projects include TMS, electrocortigraphy (ECoG) and stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG). She is especially interested in bridging the gap between models and experiments in noninvasive brain stimulation through model-based experiments that have the potential to improve experimental outcomes as well as modeling techniques.

Dr. Andrew Janson - Vanderbilt University - Andrew Janson was trained in biomedical engineering and computer science and is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science (VUIIS). His research interests include computational neuroscience and surgical interventions (e.g. deep brain stimulation and tissue resection) for the treatment of neurological disorders, such as traumatic brain injury and epilepsy. The focus of his work is to improve surgical decision making and to guide long-term patient management through the use and visualization of bioelectric field simulations integrated with functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging. He investigates novel surgical targets and image-based biomarkers to adapt surgical interventions on a patient-specific basis to improve the chances of providing a successful therapy that improves patient quality of life.

Recent Challenges in Medical Visualization

When: TBD

Organizers

Noeska Natasja Smit, Department of Informatics, University of Bergen
Christina Gillman, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany
Thomas Wischgoll, Wright State University

Contact: gillmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de

Summary

Medical is a popular application in visualization. In this area, there are decades of development. In addition, the medical application highly contributes to the visualization research. Medicine itself is a developing area, where novel imaging, diagnosis, and treatment techniques are constantly developed and improved. Due to the increasing data complexity in this field, novel challenges arise when considering medical visualization. Still, by now fewer and fewer medical visualization contributions appear in proceedings of VIS related conferences. In this application spotlight, we aim to summarize and discuss recent challenges and proposed solutions in the area of medical visualization. These challenges include uncertainty visualization, multi-modal visualization, teaching of medical students, challenges in publishing medical visualization papers, surgery assistance, and legal regulations that need to be considered when proposing novel visualization techniques to the medical market.

We plan to structure our application spotlight as follows. First, we intend to invite selected speakers, that are working in the field of medical visualization to obtain their opinion on recent challenges in this field. Subsequently, we aim to feature a lively discussion with the audience of our spotlight to identify additional problems. Furthermore, we aim to highlight recent problems in publishing papers in the application area of medical. This discussion will be the main part of the application spotlight and will be carefully tracked. Based on the proposed event, we aim to provide a list of current challenges in medical visualization that will be publicly available. We hope that this list of challenges provides a deeper understanding to the VIS community as to why developments in medical visualizations are in high demand and how our community can benefit from and contribute to them.

Opportunities and Challenges in Cosmology Visualization

When: TBD

Organizers

Pascal Grosset, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Silvio Rizzi, Argonne National Laboratory
Jesus Pulido, Los Alamos National Laboratory
James Ahrens, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Contact: pascal.av.grosset@gmail.com

Summary

Cosmologists use massive computer simulations to verify that models of the formation of the universe match observational data from telescopes. The massive data from these simulations create a number of opportunities for visualization, such as: 1) The Epoch of Reionization, which starts when stars first appeared after the big bang and radiation from these stars started ionizing hydrogen. This problem is similar to volume rendering but different enough that current volume rendering APIs cannot be used directly. How do we change graphics APIs to solve the reionization problem? 2) The data generated by these simulations is so large that only a few timesteps can be saved by the simulations. In post-hoc visualization, a significant amount of data wrangling is required to convert data from simulation format to something that visualization tools understand, requiring several iterations until the results are useful to the science team. Creating customizable workflows to achieve automatic visualization is an interesting research/application problem. In addition, how do we create pipelines for insitu visualization given the restrictions on memory and resources of simulation codes? 3) Validation is important in the field of cosmology, and some cosmologists compare Lagrangian cosmology simulations to Eulerian ones. How do we compare visualizations from these two different topologies? Can we assume that a point cloud volume rendering is equivalent to a grid based volume rendering?

The Spotlight will be organized into the following sessions with short 10 mins technical talk and 15 mins talk about Cosmology by Katrin Heitmann and the OpenSpace Project by Anders Ynnerman.

Session 1: What is Cosmology

  • Introduction to Cosmology: Cosmology, the study of the origin and development of the universe, is in the most scientifically exciting phase. Over three decades of observational astronomy has culminated into simulation models that enable the generation of detailed pictures of the first moments after the Universe was born. In this introduction, Katrin Heitmann will cover the areas of observational and simulation cosmology and its challenges.
  • Katrin Heitmann is a Physicist and Computational Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory in the High Energy Physics Division. She is also a Senior Member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago and a member of NAISE at Northwestern. Before joining Argonne, Katrin was a staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her research currently focuses on computational cosmology, in particular on trying to understand the causes for the accelerated expansion of the Universe. She is responsible for large simulation campaigns with HACC and for the tools in the associated analysis library, CosmoTools. Katrin is a member of several major astrophysical surveys that aim to shed light on this question and is the currently the Computing Coordinator for the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration.

Session 2: Ray Tracing

  • Re-ionization of the Universe: where Hannah will talk about the radiative processes that happened in the early universe and the challenges in simulating those.

  • Hannah Ross started her academic career by studying natural sciences (physics and computer science) at Durham University. She then went on to do a PhD with Ilian Iliev at the University of Sussex where she worked on radiative transfer simulations of X-ray heating and ionization from the first galaxies. She is now a postdoctoral scholar at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab working with Zarija Lukic on simulating the large scale structure of the Universe as part of the exascale computing project.

  • Intel Tools for Cosmology Visualization: where Aaron will go into tools developed by Intel that should facilitate the Cosmology visualization.

  • Aaron Knoll is a Graphics Engineer at Intel Corporation. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 2009. His interests include ray tracing, volume rendering and large scale scientific visualization.

  • NVidia Tools for Cosmology Visualization: Cosmology simulations offer a broad spectrum of visualization challenges, ranging from IO optimizations to proper density representation of point particles and level of detail decimation. In this short presentation, I will touch on some GPU accelerated technologies supporting this space, including GPU accelerated IO, LOD services and point particle rendering.
  • Peter Messmer is a senior manager at NVIDIA, responsible for the HPC visualization efforts. After spending more than 15 years performing fundamental research using massively parallel systems and developing HPC- and GPU-accelerated applications for industry and government clients, he joined NVIDIA to help clients using GPUs to accelerate their scientific discovery processes. Peter holds an MSc and PhD in physics from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, with specialization in kinetic plasma physics and nonlinear optics.

Session 3: Visualization

  • Comparison of Eulerian and Lagrangian code: When comparing Eulerian and Lagrangian code for simulation, statistical methods are sometimes insufficient in categorizing the difference between methods. In this talk, Jesus Pulido will go over visualization workflows and present findings that supported domain researchers in improving their codes.

  • Jesus Pulido is a staff research scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), as part of Data Science at Scale (DSS) Team in the Applied Computer Science Group in CCS-7. Pulido received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California, Davis under Prof. Bernd Hamann in 2019. Pulido specializes in data analysis, data reduction, visualization, high performance computing, wavelets and multi-resolution methods. He has experience in applications of image sensors, astronomy, turbulence and cosmology.

  • Exascale visualization, techniques and challenges: where Joe will describe his work on visualization of large-scale cosmology datasets, and the challenges in the transition to exascale architectures.
  • Joseph Insley is the Team Lead for Visualization and Data Analysis at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. He received his M.S. in Computer Science and M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests include the development of parallel and scalable methods for large-scale data analysis and visualization and in situ workflows on current and next-generation systems.

Session 4: OpenSpace Visualization

  • OpenSpace is an open source interactive data visualization software that has been developed to visualize the universe. In this talk, Anders will go over the challenges of building such software and will demo some of the capabilities of OpenSpace.
  • Professor Anders Ynnerman received a Ph.D. in physics from Gothenburg University, Sweden. During the early 90s, he was at Oxford University, UK, and Vanderbilt University, USA. From 1997 to 2002, he directed the Swedish National Supercomputer Centre, and from 2002 to 2006, he directed the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC). Since 1999, he holds the chair in scientific visualization at Linköping University and is the director of the Norrköping Visualization Center C. Ynnerman is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2007 Ynnerman was awarded the Akzo Nobel Science award and in 2010 he received the Swedish Knowledge Award for dissemination of scientific knowledge to the public. In 2017 he was honored with the King’s medal for his contributions to science and in 2018 he received the IEEE VGTC technical achievement award.

More information and resources at: https://sites.google.com/view/viscomsospotlight/

The Role of Visualization in Industrial Production

When: TBD

Petra Gospodnetic, Image Processing Department, Fraunhofer ITWM, Kaiserslautern Christina Gillman, Leipzig University Prof. Dr. Gerik Scheuermann, Institute of Computer Science, Leipzig University

Contact: gillmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de

Summary

Industrial production is a manifold and complex process holding several substeps from product concept over prototyping to manufacturing and quality management. Here, visualization approaches can be applied in nearly each step in order to increase the quality of decision making processes. In this context, each step of the process contributes unique requirements for visualizations to be applicable. This holds several problems: first, there is no standardization for visualizations in industrial production. Second, companies and visualization researchers can follow different aims which can make it hard to build a functional collaboration and third, there is no mechanism that keeps track of already invested or unsolved problems in visualization in industrial production. In this application spotlight we aim to shed a light on the application of industrial production when concerning visualization tasks. We aim to bring together different actors in visualization of industrial production, such as visualization researchers, research institutes and company fellows. We aim to structure our application spotlight along the industrial production pipeline and highlight the challenges when considering visualization approaches. Furthermore, the spotlight aims to discuss the open problems and solved tasked on the boundary between visualization research and industrial production. Here, the goal is to generate an overview over the role of visualization in industrial production, generate access for visualization researchers to this unique application and build a first step in creating a taxonomy of visualizations in industrial production.