Sunday

Tutorial 1 (Full day)
Interactive Visualization of Volumetric Data on Consumer PC Hardware

Interactive visualization is no longer restricted to expensive workstations and dedicated hardware thanks to the fast evolution of consumer graphics. Course participants will learn to leverage new features of graphics hardware to build applications for the interactive visualization of volumetric data. A large body of the course deals with high-quality volume rendering. Beginning with basic texture-based approaches, the algorithms are improved and expanded incrementally, covering illumination, non-polygonal isosurfaces, transfer function design, volumetric effects, and hardware-accelerated high-quality filtering. The final session of the course discusses volumetric flow visualization and aspects of system design. Course participants are provided with documented source code covering details usually omitted in publications.

Difficulty: Beginner - Intermediate

Daniel Weiskopf, University of Stuttgart
Klaus Engel, Siemens Corporate Research
Markus Hadwiger, VRVis Research Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization
Joe Michael Kniss, University of Utah
Aaron Lefohn, University of Utah

Tutorial 2 (Full day)
Integrating Visualization with Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery for High Dimensional Data Exploration and Discovery

This tutorial will provide the necessary background to understand the issues in the development and usage of visualization integrated with data mining and knowledge discovery systems with focus on biomolecular and medical informatics. We will provide a brief history of data visualization and data mining, provide details on the numerous mining and visualization techniques, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each, highlight how these are integrated today and could be in the future, discuss the impact of such integration for biomolecular and medical informatics, examine both sample commercial and academic knowledge discovery systems and what support each provides with respect to visualization and data mining. Finally we will provide numerous case studies ranging from gene expression analysis to personalized medicine. Many slides, videotapes and demonstrations will be provided.

Difficulty: Beginner

Georges Grinstein, University of Massachusetts at Lowell

Monday

Tutorial 3 (Full day)
Multi-Resolution Modeling, Visualization and Compression of Volumetric Data

Due to the increasing complexity of volume meshes produced in many applications, multiresolution representations, simplification and compression have become key technologies for achieving efficient storage together with interactive modeling and visualization performance. View-dependent adaptive approximations can be extracted from multi-resolution representations enabling real-time isosurfacing and direct volume rendering. This course covers the foundations in the construction of multi-resolution volume meshes, simplification and real-time extraction of adaptive approximations for visualization. Advanced topics include subdivision methods, compression, progressive transmission and out-of-core processing. The course is intended for programmers or researchers interested in developing efficient, interactive modeling and visualization of 3D volumetric models.

Difficulty: Intermediate

Paolo Cignoni, Italian National Research Council.
Leila De Floriani, University of Maryland and University of Genova.
Valerio Pascucci, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Jarek Rossignac, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Cláudio T. Silva, University of Utah.

Tutorial 4 (Full day)
Out-of-Core Algorithms for Scientific Visualization and Computer Graphics

Input/Output (I/O) communication between fast internal memory and slower external memory is a major bottleneck in many large-scale applications. Algorithms specifically designed to reduce the I/O bottleneck are called external-memory algorithms. This course will focus on describing techniques for handling datasets larger than main memory in scientific visualization and computer graphics. The main focus is on core algorithmic ideas, which will be presented in the context of recently developed external memory techniques for a wide variety of graphics and visualization problems, including surface simplification, volume rendering, isosurface generation, ray tracing, surface reconstruction, and so on. Its goal is to provide students and graphics professionals with an effective knowledge of current techniques, as well as the foundation to develop novel techniques on their own.

Difficulty: Intermediate

Yi-Jen Chiang, Polytechnic University
Jihad El-Sana, Ben-Gurion University
Peter Lindstrom, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Renato Pajarola, University of California, Irvine
Cláudio T. Silva, University of Utah

Tuesday

Tutorial 5 (Full day)
Medical Visualization with ITK. How to Integrate the Insight Toolkit into Visualization Applications

This tutorial underlines the importance of integrating visualization with segmentation and registration methods when developing medical image applications. The symbiosis of visualization with segmentation and registration will be discussed. The reasons why each process benefits from the other will be illustrated with practical examples.

ITK is the Open Source Image Segmentation and Registration Toolkit developed with the support of the National Library of Medicine. ITK's design principles, including data representation and algorithms, will be described. Guidelines for working with visualization packages such as OpenGL and VTK and with GUI packages such as FLTK and Qt will be presented. Case studies will be presented to illustrate the potential of the toolkit for building applications involving medical image processing and visualization.

Difficulty: Intermediate

Luis Ibáñez, Kitware, Inc.
Josh Cates, University of Utah
Lydia Ng, Insightful
Yarden Livnat, University of Utah

Tutorial 6 (half day, morning)
Tutorial on Network Visualization

Many problems may be represented as networks and analyzed using network visualization. Examples include understanding AT&T's long distance traffic (obvious), visualizing purchasing correlations among skews in a large department store (market basket analysis), and also showing popular paths through a website. This tutorial will cover all aspects of network visualization. These include common visual metaphors for representing network data, describe node positioning and graph layout algorithms, present visual techniques for interacting with network data, and discuss techniques for scaling network visualizations. A theme throughout will be examples take from real world network visualizations.

Difficulty: Beginner

Stephen G. Eick, Visintuit, LLC
T. Alan Keahey, Visintuit, LLC

Tutorial 7 (half day, afternoon)
Advanced Virtual Medicine: Techniques and Applications for Virtual Endoscopy and Soft-Tissue-Simulation

One of the largest application domains of computer graphics is medicine. Numerous techniques ranging from medical imaging to virtual medicine are used in both daily health-care practice and in research. In particular, recent developments in minimally invasive surgery require an advanced planning and intra-operative support through computer science methods. Even until recently, 2D medical imaging remained to be the standard for the planning of these interventions, while 3D and virtual medicine methods are only slowly merging into hospitals. This, however has dramatically changed with the introduction of intra-operative navigation systems.

In this course, we will first give an introduction into medical imaging methods, both in 2D and 3D. Based on this foundation, the course will further explore a variety of methods for virtual medicine. In particular, we will discuss virtual endoscopy and softtissue-simulation - two of the most actively researched fields in virtual medicine. Together, these two 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.

Difficulty: Intermediate

Dirk Bartz, University of Tübingen
Michael Hauth, University of Tübingen
Klaus Mueller, Stony Brook University