Computer Graphics and Visualization • Publications

In Proceedings of Visual Computing in Biology and Medicine

InkVis: A High-Particle-Count Approach for Visualization of Phase-Contrast Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data

Niels de Hoon, Kai Lawonn, A.C. Jalba, Elmar Eisemann, and Anna Vilanova

Streak visualization showing the formation, shedding and breakdown of a vortex in a patient with an aortic dissection in the aortic arch and regurgitation is present in the ascending aorta. The corresponding video can be found in the supporting material.

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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Citation

Niels de Hoon, Kai Lawonn, A.C. Jalba, Elmar Eisemann, and Anna Vilanova, InkVis: A High-Particle-Count Approach for Visualization of Phase-Contrast Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data, In Proceedings of Visual Computing in Biology and Medicine, pp. 177–188, 2019.

BibTex

@inproceedings{bib:de hoon:2019,
    author       = { de Hoon, Niels and Lawonn, Kai and Jalba, A.C. and Eisemann, Elmar and Vilanova, Anna },    
    title        = { InkVis: A High-Particle-Count Approach for Visualization of Phase-Contrast Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data },
    booktitle    = { In Proceedings of Visual Computing in Biology and Medicine },
    year         = { 2019 },
    pages        = { 177--188 },
    doi          = { 10.2312/vcbm.20191243 },
    dblp         = { conf/vcbm/HoonLJEV19 },
    url          = { https://publications.graphics.tudelft.nl/papers/112 },
}