Speakers: Ragnar Nortvedt (MedViz program manager) and Ivan Viola (Dept. of Informatics, UiB)

Place: Møterom 9.1 and 9.2, Laboratoriebygget 9 etg., Haukeland University Hospital

Time: Friday 14 December 2012, from 12.00pm to 1.00pm

Talk 1: The Laboratory Fish - image analyses along the route to implement translational research
The present talk will give some examples of image analysis from the previous millennium, starting with two perpendicular oriented cameras to quantify fish swimming speed, proceeding with quantification of muscle contraction, segmentation of muscle anomalies and visualizing body composition of fish.
The laboratory fish can serve as a model in translational research. Although fish will probably never replace mammals as experimental animals, they can substitute for mammals in certain stages, e.g. of carcinogenicity testing experiments using fish can be more sensitive, conducted more rapidly, and more economical than experiments using mammals.
From my own research background I foresee that future medical imaging can base some of the experiments on basic biological research, combining several imaging technologies and latent variable projections to extract crucial information and model medical responses from a multitude of images. This can only be achieved by an even closer co-operation by the scientists in the MedViz cluster.

Talk 2: Exciting Years with Ultrasound et al.
Medical ultrasound is in the recent years experiencing a rapid development in the quality of real-time 3D ultrasound imaging. Image quality of the 3D volume that was previously possible to achieve within the range of few seconds is now possible to achieve in a fraction of a second. This technological advance offers entirely new opportunities for the use of ultrasound in clinics. In my talk, I will discuss several enabling visual computing technologies such as image registration, filtering, segmentation, and visualization, developed in the course of the IllustraSound project that together give the ultrasound new potential for the use in clinical environment.

Additional material: Flyer, MedViz webpage

Speaker: Brit Hellw Aarskog (Dept. of Informatics, UiB)

Place: Auditorium, VilVite Science Center

Time: Friday 9 November 2012, from 10.15am to 11.15pm

Abstract:
Brit Helle Aarskog will present some central issues concerning thematic text zonation and procedures that determine named entities within these zones, thus providing data about the named entities' contextual scene.
A text zone constitutes a group of textual units with a certain number of shared features on lexical level, grammatical level, semantic level, and/or pragmatic level (statistics as dispersion values, mutual information score, keyness of keyness, etc.). A zonation procedure basically performs an advanced cluster analysis. The critical issue is to determine the threshold values for similarity scores. Thematic text zones are continuous, discontinuous, and overlapping with reference to the various levels of similarity.
When it comes to text visualisation, this is simply an open question which has not been considered into detail. However, we have some basic ideas about for instance 'elevating' text zones with verbs mainly in the present tense, colour schemes for thematic zones (text spans with a high density of certain thematic indicators), and more wild ideas about how the user can select between several options for visualisation of textual patterns.

Additional material: Flyer

Place: VilVite Center

Time: Thursday 4 October 2012, from 9.00am to 5.00pm

Program:
In the morning session, 9:00, Veronika Solteszova will be given the opportunity to defend her PhD thesis. The evaluation committee consists of Prof. Petter Bjørstad and evaluators Prof. Anna Vilanova from Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, and Prof. Anders Ynnerman from Linköping University, Sweden. The defense will be followed by a small reception.
In the afternoon the VisGroup Bergen organizes a Mini-Symposium on Medical Visualization. The thesis evaluators, renowned medical visualization researchers, have kindly accepted to give a talk as part of the mini-symposium. Moreover, we proudly host other speakers, who have shared their knowledge, experience, and technology with us, and not at the least with, Veronika Solteszova, the PhD candidate. Veronika's work has been inspired by illustration and visual arts and Veronika was during her studies in a frequent exchange with professional medical illustrator Kari Toverud. You might know that Kari illustrated the entire first, and upcoming second, edition of the Menneskets Fysiologi texbook. Veronika was also often given data and feedback from the medical ultrasound industry, and Erik Steen principal engineer GE Vingmed Ultrasound will share with us current trends and future challenges in ultrasound technology. Furthermore we are happy that Edi Gröller, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Informatics, UiB, has also agreed to present latest medical visualization work from Vienna University of Technology.

Additional material: Flyer, MedViz webpage

Speaker: Helwig Hauser (Dept. of Informatics, UiB)

Place: Room 2143, 2nd floor, HiB (data blokk), Thormøhlensgate 55

Time: Friday 14 September 2012, from 10.15am to 11.15am

Abstract:
One central characteristic of our information age is that increasingly often we should exploit the wealth of available data for the sake of learning, decision making, as well as other tasks. A promising approach - not at the least also targeted by visual analytics - is to integrate the strengths of computers (fast computation, efficient handling of large datasets, comparably low costs, etc.) with the strengths of the users (perceptual capabilities, considering domain know-ledge, detecting the unexpected, etc.). In this talk, we look at one possible solution, i.e., the concept of interactive visual analysis, and describe it as an iterative process, enabling the integration of computational and interactive means for data exploration and analysis. We consider a data scenario that opposes dependent and independent data dimensions (like in a table), general enough to match many different application cases. We focus on the case of multivariate data, but also address the case of high-dimensional data and opportunities for exploring and analyzing such data. After all, we think of interactive visual analysis as an iterative process, where each step is performed on the basis of a toolbox with computational and interactive visual solutions.

Additional material: Flyer, Prof Hauser's webpage

The VCF seminar series will start again after the summer.
The first seminar of the next academic year will be on September 14.
We would like to thank all the speakers and all the participants, and we really hope you enjoyed the seminars. We wish a good summer to all of you!
The Visualization Group

Place: Galeasen Loyal, Leaving from Bradbenken

Time: Friday 15 June 2012, from 12.30pm (sharp!) to 15.30pm

Program:
1) Science and Networking, Promises and Challenges (Kenneth Hugdahl, 20 min.)
2) Selected Bergen Activities related to Visual Computing (Helwig Hauser, 20 min.)
3) MedViz Highlights and Future Aspects (Odd Helge Gilja, 20 min.)
Limited number of places, to register send an e-mail to elin.riple@med.uib (subject "MedViz-VCF seminar June 15 - VCF registration") no later than June 12!

Additional material: Flyer, MedViz webpage, Galeasen Loyal webpage

Speaker: Inge Jonassen (UiB, Uni Computing, Uni Research)

Place: Room 3137, floor 3, HIB (data blokk), Thormøhlensgate 55

Time: Friday 11 May 2012, from 11.00am to 12.00am

Abstract:
Bioinformatics is the application of computer science and information technology to the field of biology and medicine. Many applications of bioinformatics aim to extract information and gain insight from data. In experimental projects, a biological question is addressed by designing an experiment generating data that allows testing a hypothesis or extracting patterns relating to underlying biology. Data generated within one project should be interpreted in context of knowledge accumulated in the field and represented in biological databases or in the scientific literature. In order to help understanding it is highly useful to represent data and patterns using visualization techniques and statistics are essential to test whether identified patterns are likely to occur by chance. In this talk I will discuss how visualization including information visualization can be utilized to aid in understanding bioinformatics data and methods.

Additional material: Flyer, Inge Jonassen's webpage, Uni Computing webpage

Speaker: Dr. Klaus Johannsen

Place: Room 3137, floor 3, HIB (data blokk), Thormøhlensgate 55

Time: Friday 13 Apr 2012, from 11.00am to 12.00am

Abstract:
Uni Computing is a department of Uni Research, the research company of the University of Bergen. The department carries out research and development in basic and applied areas with a focus on computational techniques: Bio-informatics, computational linguistics and ecology and environmental flow mechanics. It furthermore develops and operates (corresponding) IT-solutions and e-infrastructures for the department, Uni Research, UiB, a.o.
In this presentation we will give an overview over the current activities and discuss some of the department's future plans. We will highlight the current and future needs regarding computational resources, data analysis and post-processing and will discuss in which way visualization is or could be of interest for our activities.

Additional material: Flyer, Dr. Johannsen's webpage, Uni Computing webpage, Slides

Speaker: Paolo Angelelli

Place: Room 3137, floor 3, HIB (data blokk), Thormøhlensgate 55

Time: Friday 9 Mar 2012, from 11.00am to 12.00am

Abstract:
For many years, medical visualization has focused on human anatomy. Comparably recent innovations in the fields of medical imaging, modeling and simulation made the generation of data related to physiological processes in the human body possible. Due to the complexity of this data, new visualization techniques have been proposed and employed, which go beyond the previous anatomy visualization methods. This talk will provide an overview of the current state of the art in the visualization of human physiology.

Additional material: Flyer, Slides

Speaker: Daniel Patel

Place: Room 3137, floor 3, HIB (data blokk), Thormøhlensgate 55

Time: Friday 10 Feb 2012, from 11.00am to 12.00am

Abstract:
The talk will touch upon topics such as:
1) Ground truth visualization of measured seismic data.
2) Automated object extraction for getting computer assistance in segmenting important structures in the seismic data such as horizons and faults.
3) Fast GPU-creation, visualizing and visual fusion of multiattribute seismic data.

Additional material: Flyer, Slides

Speaker: Professor Xue-Cheng Tai

Place: Room 3137, floor 3, HIB (data blokk), Thormøhlensgate 55

Time: Friday 20 Jan 2012, from 11.00am to 12.00am

Abstract:
A network can often be represented as a graph. Max-flow/min-cuts over a given graph can be used to find optimal solutions for many complicated network problems. It is known that these kind of problems are often NP-hard and they pose some very challenging minimization problems for simulations. In this talk, we will show how to use graph and cuts methods for some image processing and computer vision problems. Especially, we shall present our recent work extending the concept of max-flow/min-cuts to "networks" that are infinite dimension, i.e we will talk about continuous max-flow/min-cuts problems. When we discretize these continuous max-flow problems, we come back to the ordinary finite dimension max-flow problems. The continuous max-flow models can be solved through the solution of some partial differential equations. One advantage of the continuous max-flow problem is that we can use many convex optimization methods to solve it. We are released from some restricted searching algorithms for network problems.

Additional material: Flyer, Professor Xue-Cheng Tai webpage, Slides