Sunday

Tutorial 1 (Full Day)
Visual Medicine: Techniques, Applications and Software

Level: Beginners (Morning) - Intermediate/Advanced (Afternoon)

One of the largest application domains of visualization is medicine. 3D visualization techniques are essential in both daily health-care practice and in clinical research. In particular, recent developments in image acquisition, diagnostic procedures and minimally-invasive surgery require an advanced planning and intra-operative support through computer science methods. With the increased spatial and temporal resolution, 3D and time-varying visualizations become important for selected diagnostic procedures and for a wide range of therapy planning scenarios ranging from radiation treatment planning to neurosurgical interventions.

In this tutorial, we will first give an introduction into medical imaging methods - such as data acquisition, data analysis, segmentation, registration and rendering - both in 2D and 3D. Based on this foundation, the course will further explore a variety of advanced topics of visual medicine. In particular, we will discuss visualization of vascular structures, visual analysis of perfusion data, diffusion tensor imaging, OR-fit mixed reality methods for surgery, and soft-tissue simulation - some of the most actively researched fields in visual medicine.

Together, these topics form important components towards more realistic interaction with the virtualized human body. Besides the technical aspects, we will also discuss the advantages to traditional methods, but will also illustrate their specific and inherent limitations.

Steffen Oeltze - Organizer
Gordon Kindlmann
Florian Link
Klaus Mueller
Bernhard Preim
Markus Wacker
Dirk Bartz

Tutorial notes: http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/cv/tutorials.html

Tutorial 2 (Half Day, afternoon)
Remote/Collaborative TeraScale Visualization on the TeraGrid

Level: Intermediate/Advanced

This tutorial will provide an overview of remote and collaborative visualization tools in the context of the National Science Foundation TeraGrid project. The TeraGrid is an open scientific discovery infrastructure combining leadership class resources at partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource. Deployment of the TeraGrid was completed in 2004 and brings over 40 teraflops of computing power, nearly 2 petabytes of rotating storage, and specialized data analysis and visualization resources into production, interconnected at 10-30 gigabits/second via a dedicated national network. The TeraGrid currently serves approximately 2500 national users. In this tutorial, we will provide an overview of the visualization hardware resources available on the TeraGrid. Additionally, we will describe the visualization services that are currently available from each of the TeraGrid resource partners. We will provide an introduction to the UC/ANL ParaView portal, the TACC VNC-based ParaView portal, and the Purdue Nanohub visualization portal. We will also present our vision for a more integrated TeraGrid visualization environment moving forward. The session will conclude with an open discussion where attendees are encouraged to share their views on further visualization services and future participation.

Kelly Gaither - Organizer
Michael E. Papka
David Ebert

Tutorial notes: http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/~kelly/VIS2006

Monday

Tutorial 3 (Full Day)
Illustrative Visualization for Medicine and Science

Level: Intermediate

This tutorial presents recent research and developments from academia in illustrative visualization focusing on its use for medical/science subjects. The presentation of the topics is balanced between descriptions of traditional methods and practices, practical implementation motivated approaches and evaluation, and detailed descriptions and analysis of illustrative techniques and algorithms.

First, an overview of traditional illustration for technical, scientific, and medical subjects is provided. This is followed by a description of the main components in an illustrative visualization pipeline for developing systems to assist technical and scientific illustrators. The tutorial progresses with an overview of the techniques used in illustration as well as approaches to evaluate their use and effectiveness. The lectures in this section describe the latest approaches in computerized illustration algorithms for scientific and medical data for both surface and volumetric data, covering techniques from silhouette enhancement to stippling, to cut-away viewing, labeling, and focus+context rendering. The tutorial includes a trained medical illustrator discussing the principles/caveats/issues in using illustration techniques in real-world medical applications. This lecture will also describe an evaluation, from an illustrator's point of view, of the use and quality of the techniques presented throughout the day. The tutorial concludes with discussion on specific medical case studies where illustrative visualization has been effectively applied.

David S. Ebert - Co-organizer
Mario Costa Sousa - Co-organizer
Stefan Bruckner - Co-organizer
Ivan Viola - Co-organizer
Don Stredney
Bill Andrews
Nikolai Svakhine
Christian Tietjen
Bruce Gooch

Tutorial notes: http://www.ii.uib.no/~ivan/vis2006-tutorial.pdf

Tutorial 4 (Half Day, morning)
Level Set Methods for Visualization

Level: All

Level set methods, an important class of partial differential equation (PDE) methods, define dynamic surfaces implicitly as the level set (iso-surface) of a sampled, evolving nD function. This course is targeted for researchers interested in learning about level set methods, and their application to visualization. The course material will be presented by two recognized experts in the field, and will include introductory concepts, practical considerations and extensive details on a variety of level set applications.

The course will be taught at an intermediate to advanced level. Therefore attendees should have a working knowledge of calculus, linear algebra, computer graphics and geometric modeling. Some familiarity with differential geometry, differential equations, numerical computing and image processing is strongly recommended, but not required. The course will begin with preparatory material that introduces the concept of using deformable implicit models to solve problems in visualization. This will include the structure and behavior of the level set differential equation, as well as an introduction to level set software. The second stage of the course will describe the numerical methods, algorithms and data structures needed to implement the mathematics and methods presented in the first stage. The final stage will describe in detail a number of level set visualization applications, e.g. volume dataset segmentation (including interactive segmentation on GPUs), 3D morphing, and surface reconstruction from contours and point clouds.

David Breen - Organizer
Ken Museth

Tutorial notes: http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~david/Papers/Viz06_LS_Course_Notes.pdf

Tutorial 5 (Half Day, afternoon)
Experimental Design and Analysis for Human-Subject Visualization Experiments

Level: Intermediate

The proposed tutorial is for researchers and engineers, working in the field of visualization, who wish to either (1) conduct visualization evaluation experiments with human subjects, and/or (2) gain a better understanding of the basic terminology of experimental design and analysis (e.g., the precise meaning of statements such as F(2,45) = 5.67, p = .023). To illustrate the discussed principles and techniques, the tutorial includes illustrative case studies of actual human-subject experiments. Most of these have been conducted in the domain of virtual and augmented reality systems, but the principles and techniques are independent of any particular problem domain, and apply to visualization domain problems as well. This tutorial introduces the basics of experimental design and analysis. Especially regarding experimental analysis, it focuses on the fundamental logic behind topics such as hypothesis testing and analysis of variance, while avoiding the complexities that come from considering individual statistical tests. Topics include: generating empirically testable hypotheses, experimental validity, standard statistical designs, independent and dependent variables, experimental design and counterbalancing, statistical tests, gathering and describing data, inferential statistics, hypothesis testing, power and effect size analysis, analysis of variance (ANOVA), and reporting statistical results.

J. Edward Swan II

Tutorial notes: http://www.cse.msstate.edu/~swan/teaching/tutorials/Swan-Vis2006-Tutorial.pdf

Tuesday

Tutorial 6 (Full Day)
Texture and Feature-Based Flow Visualization

Level: Beginner/Intermediate

The design of methods permitting the visual representation of complex flow phenomena has always been a major research thrust in Scientific Visualization. More than 15 years after the first contributions on the topic, the mission of Flow Visualization remains a challenging one: to create the tools that scientists and engineers need to gain insight from the huge amount of flow data resulting from experimental measurements and numerical simulations. The computer graphics and scientific visualization communities have recently witnessed a strong trend toward growth and progress in the topics of texture and feature-based flow visualization methodologies. These complementary approaches offer powerful means to display the qualitative and quantitative properties of large, time-dependent vector fields. This tutorial brings together both the fundamentals and the latest results of the corresponding research in the form of presentations, demonstrations, literature, and supplementary material. It is targeted toward all those with an interest in flow visualization, including mathematical basis, visual paradigms, algorithms, implementation, perception aspects, and practical application. It will especially appeal to those interested in seeing first hand, not only the basics, but also state-of-the-art techniques and ongoing research. Practitioners will learn how these flow visualization techniques can be applied to the results of real-world Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations and experience the benefits of these methods for the validation and analysis of large-scale, complex data sets. In fact, some of the techniques presented here have already been implemented in the framework of industry-level software which is now on the market.

Robert S. Laramee - Organizer
Gordon Erlebacher
Christoph Garth
Holger Theisel
Xavier Tricoche
Tino Weinkauf
Daniel Weiskopf

Tutorial notes: http://www-hagen.informatik.uni-kl.de/vis06-tutorial/

Tutorial 7 (Half Day, morning)
Color in Information Display

Level: Beginner

Color is a key component of information display that is easy to use badly. As a result, Edward Tufte's key principle for color design is "do no harm." While inspired color design is an art, the principles that underlie good color design have their roots in human perception and a deep understanding of the color properties of different media. This course is designed to introduce the technical community to the visual principles that inform good design, and the advances in color science, color technology, and color appearance modeling that can be applied to the problem of using color effectively in information display. The course will provide many concrete and detailed examples to illustrate the practical aspects of the theory.

Maureen C. Stone

Tutorial notes: http://www.stonesc.com/Vis06/index.htm

Thursday

Tutorial 8 (Full Day)
Modern Parallel Coordinates: Relational Information --> Clear Patterns

The desire to augment our perception, limited by our 3-dimensional experience, and the need to understand multivariate problems spawned several multidimensional visualization methodologies. Understanding the underlying geometry of a multivariate problem provides insight into what is possible and what is not. After a short overview, Parallel Coordinates are introduced and developed rigorously, using new didactic software, showing how multidimensional lines, hyperplanes, flats, curves and smooth hypersurfaces can be visualized unambiguously. The visualization of the family of close planes obtained by small rotations and translations of a given plane is posed as a challenge. This is a central problem in many applications (Computer Vision, Geometric Modeling, Statistics etc). The subject's development is interlaced with applications including Visual Data Mining (EDA) on real datasets (i.e. Feature extraction, GIS, Financial, Process Control, and others with hundreds of variables). There follow collision avoidance algorithms for air traffic control and detection of coplanarity and near-coplanarity. A geometric automatic classifier is applied to challenging clustering and classification problems. It finds and orders, according to their predictive value, the minimal set of variables providing the classification rule explicitly and visually. Multivariate relations correspond to hypersurfaces whose visualization is derived. Nonlinear visual multivariate models are constructed from data and used interactively for decision support discovering feasibilities, interrelations, sensitivities, enabling constraint and trade-off analysis. Our goal is to concentrate the relational information into clear patterns eliminating the polygonal lines altogether. The answer to the visualization challenge posed is the construction of convex polygons representing families of close planes not only for 3-D but also for N-dimensions. The visualization of complex relations is illustrated with the representation of the winding helicoid, Moebius strip in 3-D and N-D and other surfaces.

Alfred Inselberg - Organizer
Helwig Hauser
Matthew Ward
Li Yang

Tutorial notes: http://www.VRVis.at/vis/resources/tutorial-parcoords-2006/