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Simulations and measurements of blood and airflow inside the human circulatory and respiratory system play an increasingly important role in personalized medicine for prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. This survey focuses on three main application areas. (1) Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of blood flow in cerebral aneurysms assist in predicting the outcome of this pathologic process and of therapeutic interventions. (2) CFD simulations of nasal airflow allow for investigating the effects of obstructions and deformities and provide therapy decision support. (3) 4D phase‐contrast (4D PC) magnetic resonance imaging of aortic haemodynamics supports the diagnosis of various vascular and valve pathologies as well as their treatment. An investigation of the complex and often dynamic simulation and measurement data requires the coupling of sophisticated visualization, interaction and data analysis techniques. In this paper, we survey the large body of work that has been conducted within this realm. We extend previous surveys by incorporating nasal airflow, addressing the joint investigation of blood flow and vessel wall properties and providing a more fine‐granular taxonomy of the existing techniques. From the survey, we extract major research trends and identify open problems and future challenges. The survey is intended for researchers interested in medical flow but also more general, in the combined visualization of physiology and anatomy, the extraction of features from flow field data and feature‐based visualization, the visual comparison of different simulation results and the interactive visual analysis of the flow field and derived characteristics. Simulations and measurements of blood and airflow inside the human circulatory and respiratory system play an increasingly important role in personalized medicine for prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. This survey focuses on three main application areas. (1) Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of blood flow in cerebral aneurysms assist in predicting the outcome of this pathologic process and of therapeutic interventions. (2) CFD simulations of nasal airflow allow for investigating the effects of obstructions and deformities and provide therapy decision support. (3) 4D phase‐contrast (4D PC) magnetic resonance imaging of aortic haemodynamics supports the diagnosis of various vascular and valve pathologies as well as their treatment. An investigation of the complex and often dynamic simulation and measurement data requires the coupling of sophisticated visualization, interaction and data analysis techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Rupture risk assessment is a key to devise patient‐specific treatment plans of cerebral aneurysms. To understand and predict the development of aneurysms and other vascular diseases over time, both hemodynamic flow patterns and their effect on the vessel surface need to be analyzed. Flow structures close to the vessel wall often correlate directly with local changes in surface parameters, such as pressure or wall shear stress. Yet, in many existing applications, the analyses of flow and surface features are either somewhat detached from one another or only globally available. Especially for the identification of specific blood flow characteristics that cause local startling parameters on the vessel surface, like elevated pressure values, an interactive analysis tool is missing. The explorative visualization of flow data is challenging due to the complexity of the underlying data. In order to find meaningful structures in the entirety of the flow, the data has to be filtered based on the respective explorative aim. In this paper, we present a combination of visualization, filtering and interaction techniques for explorative analysis of blood flow with a focus on the relation of local surface parameters and underlying flow structures. Coherent bundles of pathlines can be interactively selected based on their relation to features of the vessel wall and further refined based on their own hemodynamic features. This allows the user to interactively select and explore flow structures locally affecting a certain region on the vessel wall and therefore to understand the cause and effect relationship between these entities. Additionally, multiple selected flow structures can be compared with respect to their quantitative parameters, such as flow speed. We confirmed the usefulness of our approach by conducting an informal interview with two expert neuroradiologists and an expert in flow simulation. In addition, we recorded several insights the neuroradiologists were able to gain with the help of our tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Medical visualizations are highly adapted to a specific medical application scenario. Therefore, many researchers conduct qualitative evaluations with a low number of physicians or medical experts to assess the benefits of their visualization technique. Although this type of research has advantages, it is difficult to reproduce and can be subjectively biased. This makes it problematic to quantify the benefits of a new visualization technique. Quantitative evaluation can objectify research and help bringing new visualization techniques into clinical practice. To support researchers, we present guidelines to quantitatively evaluate medical visualizations, considering specific characteristics and difficulties. We demonstrate the adaptation of these guidelines on the example of comparative aneurysm surface visualizations. We developed three visualization techniques to compare aneurysm volumes. The visualization techniques depict two similar, but not identical aneurysm surface meshes. In a user study with 34 participants and five aneurysm data sets, we assessed objective measures (accuracy and required time) and subjective ratings (suitability and likeability). The provided guidelines and presentation of different stages of the evaluation allow for an easy adaptation to other application areas of medical visualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]