More details and the description for these jobs can be found here
The lucky person that gets the first position can start right away and the second position will be available from August onwards.

Combined 3D-display of conventional and angiographics MR data.

The first paper entitled ‘Shading 3D-images from CT Using Gray-Level gradients’ by Karl Heinz Höhne and Ralph Bernstein was published in 1986 in the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. This paper describes a shading method based on the partial volume effect using the gray-level gradients along a surface reconstruction of CT images. What sets this method apart from current gradient vector computations is that the gray-values are sampled in screen space and not in voxel space. As a result, surfaces perpendicular to the viewer are brighter than surfaces oriented away from the viewer. In essence, this shading method simulates a headlight configuration.

• Shading 3D-images from CT Using Gray-Level gradients – hohne86
• Shading 3D-images from CT Using Gray-Level gradients correction – hohne86

• Display of Multiple 3D-Objects Using the Generalized Voxel-Model – hohne88

Using the software and hardware that was available at the time, these papers represent many contributions to the field, for instance selective volume clipping and multimodal visualization. With their work, they created a solid foundation for state-of-the-art (medical) volume rendering techniques. The two papers usually credited as first presenting the ideas behind raycasting, both published in 1988, are:

• R. A. Drebin, L. Carpenter, and P. Hanrahan, “Volume rendering,” SIGGRAPH Comput. Graph., vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 65–74, Aug. 1988.
• M. Levoy, “Display of surfaces from volume data,” IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 29-37, May 1988.

The position has been announced via the jobbnorge-portal, together with a short description of the environment and the plans with regard to the new professor (see also the attached PDF). The application deadline is set to Dec. 22nd, 2011.

An example of work done by the Bergen VisGroup

More details and the job description can be found here. The deadline for applying is the 15th of December.

This year, the IEEE VisWeek has been completed by an excellent session on medical visualization hosting five contributions from three European countries. Roy van Pelt gave a compelling talk on the exploration of cardiovascular 4D MRI blood-flow using stylistic visualizations. His comic-inspired illustrative glyphs coupled with timelines outperform traditional particle renderings. Interactive virtual probing of the flow
avoids a tedious segmentation process in qualitative inspection.

Rostislav Khlebnikov presented a new approach to tumor accessibility planning. It exploits a well-known natural phenomenon related to light scattering at dust particles which is also called crepuscular rays. In the generated 2D/3D images, light beams in different colors that shine through the skin indicate the access paths and their associated risk.

Christian Dick presented new visualization techniques for conveying distances in interactive 3D implant planning. The design of very intuitive distance glyphs and colored slice sets was completed by a carefully accomplished, convincing user study.

Rocco Gasteiger introduced the FlowLens for focus+context visualization of blood flow in cerebral aneurysms. It supports an exploration of certain hemodynamic attributes in the lens region within the context of other attributes thereby avoiding the cognitive effort involved in mental superimposition of side-by-side visualizations. Please watch the supplemental video:

The session was completed by the interesting talk of Artem Amirkhanov on the reduction of metal artifacts in industrial 3D X-ray CT images. He presented a projection-space pipeline in which metal is separated from the other materials before projection and then fused again with the initial reconstruction after projection.

Other talks not being part of the session but also related to medical visualization were given by Claes Lundström on the application of a multi-touch table system to orthopedic surgery planning, Christian Rieder on real-time approximation of the ablation zone for radiofrequency ablation (see the very nice video), Joseph Marino on context preserving maps of tubular structures, e.g., the colon, and Paolo Angelelli on straightening aortic blood flow for side-by-side visualization.

… or the rendering below (one of my favourites):

Rendering made at interactive speeds from CT data. Note the pretty shadows!

Read more about Exposure Render by going to its TU Delft Graphics website, or to the Google Code project page where you can download and play with the software!

P.S. Don’t forget to cite the paper when it gets published.

The deadline for applying is May 15, so you better hurry up!

Chalk another one up for MedVis in the mainstream!

1. What is the relation between the lesion, functional areas and white matter tracts?
2. How can the lesion be accessed most safely?

Recently, the winning team and three honourable mentions were announced:

Winner: Pre-Operative Planning of Brain Tumor Resections by Stefan Diepenbrock, Jörg-Stefan Praßni, Florian Lindemann, Hans-Werner Bothe and Timo Ropinski.

Honourable mention 1: An Exploration and Planning Tool for Neurosurgical Interventions by Diana Röttger, Sandy Engelhardt, Christopher Denter, Burkhard Güssefeld, Annette Hausdörfer, Gerrit Lochmann, Dominik Ospelt, Janine Paschke, QiAn Tao, Stefan Müller.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Honourable mention 2: Neurosurgical Intervention Planning with VolV by Silvia Born, Daniela Wellein, Peter Rhone, Matthias Pfeifle, Jan Friedrich, Dirk Bartz.

Honourable mention 3: A Fiber Navigator for Neurosurgical Planning (NeuroPlanningNavigator) by Olivier Vaillancourt, Gabriel Girard, Arnaud Bore, Maxime Descoteaux.

You can also download a 550 MB zip file with all the contributions from the contest website.

Konrad Mühler defended his Phd thesis

With an excellent presentation Konrad nicely rounded up his Phd thesis on computer-assisted surgery. Konrad developed and refined techniques for animation, viewpoint determination and annotation of 2d slices and 3d models thus supporting the use of 3d models for surgical education and training. Together with Christian Tietjen he integrated his development in the METK – an efficient extension to Mevislab which supports the fast development of surgical applications. A major achievement of his work was the concept and realization of the LiverSurgeryTrainer – a system which directly supports the training of preoperative decisions in liver surgery based on a representative set of case data.

The commission with external reviewers Prof. Thomas Ertl and Prof. Karl-Heinz Höhne lead by Prof. Dietmar Rösner assessed his overall achievements with the best possible grade “Summa Cum Laude”.

For more information and a full PDF download of his thesis visit http://phd.kfiles.de/