Biomedical Visualization: Past Work, Current Trends and Open Challenges

This book provides an overview of the many visualization strategies that have been proposed in recent decades for solving problems within the disciplines of medicine and biology. It also evaluates which visualization techniques applied to various areas of biomedicine have been the most impactful and which challenges can be considered solved using visualization. The topics covered in this book include visualization research in omics, interaction networks and pathways, biological structures, tumor diagnosis and treatment, vasculature, brain, surgery, educational contexts, therapy and rehabilitation, electronic health records, and public health. One chapter is dedicated to general visualization techniques commonly used for biomedical data, such as surface and volume rendering, as well as abstract and illustrative approaches. For each of these areas, the past and present research trends are discussed, highlighting the influential works. Furthermore, the book explains how research is affected by developments in technology, data availability, and domain practice. Individual sections also summarize the typical target users, the nature of the data, and the typical tasks addressed in the given domain.

With a uniquely broad scope, the book identifies research trends in biomedical visualization using a manually curated and searchable repository of more than 3,800 publications. The resultant trends are further categorized according to the application field and using natural language processing. The book also utilizes 16 interviews conducted with researchers in the field of biomedical visualization for the purpose of soliciting their opinions regarding the evolution and trends in the domain.

The book handles these topics in a concise manner to help readers orient themselves in the already mature and diverse field of biomedical visualization without overwhelming them with technical details. As such, the book can help young researchers to become familiar with past challenges and identify future ones. For more senior researchers, it can serve as an insightful overview of the research field and the direction in which it is heading.

Katarína Furmanová is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Informatics at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. She obtained her Ph.D. from the same university in 2019, specializing in the area of molecular visualization. For her Ph.D. project, she received the Joseph Fourier Prize for Computer Science in 2020. Katarina was also a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University Hospital, where her research focused on designing visualization techniques for radiotherapy. Her current research interests lie both in medical and molecular visualization. She has co-organized Bio+Med+Vis Spring School in 2022.

Barbora Kozlíková is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Informatics at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, where she also got her Ph.D. degree. She is the head of the Visitlab research laboratory, specializing in the design of visualization techniques and visual analysis methods and systems for diverse application fields, including biochemistry, criminology, education, and geography. She is also very interested in the education of future generations in BioMedical visualization and building a curriculum for this domain. She was involved in the organization of an event related to this initiative, the Bio+Med+Vis Spring School in 2021. She also acted as the general chair of EG EuroVis 2018 and EG VCBM 2019. She co-organized the NII Shonan Meeting in 2020, dedicated to the formalization of BioMedical visualizations, and the Dagstuhl seminar in 2023, focused on shaping the future of biomedical data visualization. She is a member of the EG VCBM and EG EuroVis steering committees.

Thomas Höllt is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Graphics and Visualization Group (CGV) at Delft University of Technology. Before that, he was Assistant Professor in the Leiden Computational Biology Center (LCBC) at the Leiden University Medical Center. He has been awarded the Dirk Bartz Prize for Visual Computing in Medicine in 2019 and the third prize in 2021 for his work on visual analytics approaches in (spatial) single-cellanalysis. In 2023, he was awarded the VRVis Visual Computing award for sustainable development for his work on Cytosplore. His research interests include visualization and visual analytics for high-dimensional data, with a focus on biomedical applications, in particular, applications using -omics data.

Eduard Gröller is Full Professor at the Institute of Visual Computing & Human-Centered Technology (VC&HCT), TU Wien, where he is heading the Research Unit of Computer Graphics. He is a scientific proponent and key researcher of the VRVis research center. The center performs applied research in visualization, rendering, and visual analysis. Dr. Gröller is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bergen, Norway. His research interests include computer graphics, visualization, and visual computing. He became a fellow of the Eurographics Association in 2009. Dr. Gröller is the recipient of the Eurographics 2015 Outstanding Technical Contributions Award and of the IEEE VGTC 2019 Technical Achievement Award.

Bernhard Preim is a specialist in human–computer interface design and visual computing for medicine. He received his Diploma in Computer Science and his Ph.D. from the University of Magdeburg. He obtained his post-doctoral lecture qualification (Habilitation) for Computer Science at the University of Bremen. Since March 2003, he has been a full professor of Visualization at the Computer Science department at the Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg, heading a research group on medical visualization and applications in surgical education and surgery planning. Together with Charl Botha he founded the Eurographics workshop series on "Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine" in 2008 and led the steering committee of this workshop from 2010 to 2019. His research is focused on interactive visualization in medical applications targeting diagnostic and treatment planning processes, medical education, and epidemiology research.

Renata Georgia Raidou is Assistant Professor in Medical Visualization and Visual Analytics at TU Wien, Austria. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Renata has a Ph.D. in Medical Visualization from Eindhoven University of Technology. She has been awarded the Dirk Bartz Prize for Visual Computing in Medicine at Eurographics 2017, the Best Ph.D. Award 2018 of the EuroVis Awards Programme and the EuroVis Young Researcher Award 2022. Her research focus is on the interface between Visual Analytics, Image Processing, and Machine Learning, with a strong focus on medical applications. She is particularly involved in educational activities regarding (Medical) Visualization, and she has co-organized a NII Shonan Meeting on "Formalizing Biological and Medical Visualization" in 2020 and the Bio+Med+Vis Spring School in 2021 & 2022. She is actively involved in the EG VCBM workshop, where she is a member of the Steering Committee. In addition to this she is in the Steering committee of the GI-Fachgruppe VCBM and the GI-Fachgruppe VIS, as well as a Eurographics Junior Fellow. She is also Associate Editor of the Journal of Computer & Graphics.