Beautiful Visualization

Chapter 18. Postmortem Visualization: The Real Gold Standard

Anders Persson

THIS CHAPTER'S TOPIC IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to those who work in the field of medical information visualization. Emerging technologies are enabling visual representations and interaction techniques that take advantage of the human eye's broad-bandwidth pathway into the mind, allowing users to see, explore, understand, and validate large amounts of complex information at once.

A striking feature of both clinical routine and medical research today is the overwhelming amount of information—particularly, information represented as images. Practitioners are dealing with ever-larger numbers of images (hundreds or thousands rather than dozens) and more complex, higher-dimensional information (vectors or tensors rather than scalar values, arranged in image volumes directly corresponding to the anatomy rather than flat images). However, they typically still use simple two-dimensional devices such as conventional monitors to review this overflow of images, one by one. As the bottleneck is no longer the acquisition of data, future progress will depend on the development of appropriate methods for handling and analyzing the information, as well as making it comprehensible to users. One of the most important issues for the future is the workflow. The entire chain from the acquisition of data until the point at which the clinician receives the diagnostic information must be optimized, and new methods must be validated. ...