Multi Scale Human

Multiscale Human is an european Marie Curie ITN project which analyses the functionality of the human body under a dynamic 3D multi-scale approach. The aim is to obtain a better understanding of joint diseases and an efficient diagnosis and treatment of patients.

Welfen­lab works on an in­no­v­a­tive pro­ject for 3D vi­su­al­iza­tion of the mus­cu­loskele­tal sys­tem. The Leib­niz Uni­ver­sität Han­nover is in­volved the first time as a part­ner in an "EU - Marie Curie Ini­tial Train­ing Net­work Re­search".  Among other ad­van­tages, the pro­ject sup­ports the Ph.D. stud­ies of two in­ter­na­tional stu­dents at the Leib­niz Uni­ver­sität Han­nover.

The in­ter­ac­tive 3D sim­u­la­tion model of the human body com­bines mol­e­c­u­lar, cel­lu­lar, or­ganic, meta­bolic and be­hav­ioural scales. The aim of the pro­ject Mul­ti­scale­Hu­man is to show the func­tion­al­ity of the human body in a new and dy­namic way, ob­tain­ing the most adapted treat­ment for a pa­tient with dis­eases on the mus­cu­loskele­tal sys­tem.  For this pur­pose, an Eu­ro­pean net­work with part­ners from four coun­tries are in­volved, such as the Han­nover Med­ical School (MHH) . The re­search group headed by Prof. Franz-Erich Wolter and Dr. Karl-Ingo Friese has pre­sented the pro­ject in March 2013 and 2015 at CeBIT.

The med­ical data vi­su­al­iza­tion con­sti­tutes an im­por­tant re­search topic of the De­part­ment of Com­puter Graph­ics. Data comes from sev­eral imag­ing tech­niques such as com­puted to­mog­ra­phy or mag­netic res­o­nance imag­ing. From the per­spec­tive of com­puter sci­ence, the ques­tion arises of how such data can be dis­played in­ter­ac­tively in a read­ily un­der­stand­able man­ner.

Closely re­lated to the vi­su­al­iza­tion of the com­plex data is the in­ter­ac­tion with it. In the con­text of this pro­ject, new mul­ti­modal 3D-in­ter­ac­tion par­a­digms (hap­tic and touch­less) were de­vel­oped and tested. For the hap­tic com­po­nent, a pre­vi­ous work, founded by DAAD/Siemens, was used as a base for the de­vel­op­ment.

This pro­ject is co­or­di­nated by Prof. N. Thal­mann (Uni­ver­sity of Geneva). De­tailed in­for­ma­tion on the pro­ject can be found on http://​mul­ti­scale­hu­man.​mi­ralab.​ch/​

Gallery (CeBIT 2013)

Gallery (CeBIT 2015)

Publications

Artikel
2016
Ricardo Manuel Millán Vaquero, Alexander Vais, Sean Dean Lynch, Jan Rzepecki, Karl-Ingo Friese, Christof Hurschler, Franz-Erich Wolter
Helical Axis Data Visualization and Analysis of the Knee Joint Articulation (+video)
Journal of Biomechanical Engineering
138. Issue 9. DOI: 10.1115/1.4034005
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers
2016
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We present processing methods and visualization techniques for accurately characterizing and interpreting kinematical data of flexion–extension motion of the knee joint based on helical axes. We make use of the Lie group of rigid body motions and particularly its Lie algebra for a natural representation of motion sequences. This allows to analyze and compute the finite helical axis (FHA) and instantaneous helical axis (IHA) in a unified way without redundant degrees of freedom or singularities. A polynomial fitting based on Legendre polynomials within the Lie algebra is applied to provide a smooth description of a given discrete knee motion sequence which is essential for obtaining stable instantaneous helical axes for further analysis. Moreover, this allows for an efficient overall similarity comparison across several motion sequences in order to differentiate among several cases. Our approach combines a specifically designed patient-specific three-dimensional visualization basing on the processed helical axes information and incorporating computed tomography (CT) scans for an intuitive interpretation of the axes and their geometrical relation with respect to the knee joint anatomy. In addition, in the context of the study of diseases affecting the musculoskeletal articulation, we propose to integrate the above tools into a multiscale framework for exploring related data sets distributed across multiple spatial scales. We demonstrate the utility of our methods, exemplarily processing a collection of motion sequences acquired from experimental data involving several surgery techniques. Our approach enables an accurate analysis, visualization and comparison of knee joint articulation, contributing to the evaluation and diagnosis in medical applications.

Link to the paper in the Journal website      Video regarding the paper  




Beschreibungstext verbergen
2015
Ricardo Manuel Millan Vaquero, Sean Dean Lynch, Benjamin Fleischer, Jan Rzepecki, Karl-Ingo Friese, Christof Hurschler, Franz-Erich Wolter
Enhanced Visualization of the Knee Joint Functional Articulation Based on Helical Axis Method
Bildverarbeitung für die Medizin 2015, Informatik aktuell 2015
449-454
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
2015
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Comprehensive descriptions of the motion in articulating joints open new opportunities in biomedical engineering. The helical axis is a established method that describes flexion-extension at joints, which currently lacks an intuitive visualization. In this paper, we present a comprehensive visualization of knee joint motion based on a direct measurement of the helical axis. The proposed approach incorporates the three-dimensional motion of patient-specific bone segments and the representation of helical axes on the bone, facilitating the observation of the flexion-extension motion at the knee joint.

Beschreibungstext verbergen
Ricardo Manuel Millan Vaquero, Alexander Vais, Sean Dean Lynch, Jan Rzepecki, Karl-Ingo Friese, Christof Hurschler, Franz-Erich Wolter
Helical axis data visualization and analysis of the knee joint articulation (presentation)
Accepted as a lecture presentation in 29th International Congress and Exhibition of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery (CARS).
2015
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Accepted as a lecture presentation in 29th International Congress and Exhibition of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery (CARS 2015). 

Link: http://www.cars-int.org/fileadmin/templates/download/2015/cars2015_program.pdf

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Ricardo Manuel Millán Vaquero, Asan Agibetov, Jan Rzepecki, Marta Ondrésik, Alexander Vais, Joaquim Miguel Oliveira, Giuseppe Patanè, Karl-Ingo Friese, Rui Luís Reis, Michela Spagnuolo, Franz-Erich Wolter
A semantically adaptable integrated visualization and natural exploration of multi-scale biomedical data
12th International Conference BioMedical Visualization (MediVis)
2015 19th International Conference on Information Visualisation. IEEE
2015
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The exploration of biomedical data which involves heterogeneous sources coming from different spatial scales and medical domains is a challenging topic in current research. In this work, we combine efforts regarding multi-scale visualiza-tion, multimodal interaction and knowledge formalization for the exploration of multi-scale biomedical data. The knowledge formalization stores and organizes the information sources, the integrated visualization captures all relevant information for the domain expertise of the user and the multimodal interaction provides a natural exploration. We present a concrete example of use of the proposed exploratory system designed for a biologist investigating multi-scale pathologies.

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2014
Asan Agibetov, Ricardo Manuel Millán Vaquero, Karl-Ingo Friese, Giuseppe Patanè, Michela Spagnuolo and Franz-Erich Wolter
Integrated Visualization and Analysis of a Multi-scale Biomedical Knowledge Space
Proceedings of the EuroVis Workshop on Visual Analytics
25-29
The Eurographics Association
2014
Beschreibungstext anzeigen

The study and analysis of relationships in a complex and multi-scale data set is a challenge of information and scientific visualization. This work proposes an integrated visualization to capture all the important aspects of multi-scale data into the same view by leveraging the multi-scale biomedical knowledge encoded into an underly- ing ontology. Ontology supports visualization by providing semantic means to identify relevant items that must be presented to the user. The study and analysis of relationships across the scales are presented as results of queries to the multi-scale biomedical knowledge space. We demonstrate the prototype of the graphical interface of an integrated visualization framework and the knowledge formalization support in an example scenario related to the musculoskeletal diseases.

Beschreibungstext verbergen
Jan Rzepecki, Ricardo Manuel Millan Vaquero, Alexander Vais, Karl-Ingo Friese, Franz-Erich Wolter
Multimodal Approach for Natural Biomedical Multi-scale Exploration
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
8888
620–631
Springer Switzerland
2014
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Pathologies which simultaneously involve different spatial scales are often difficult to understand. Biomedical data from different modalities and spatio-temporal scales needs to be combined to obtain an understandable representation for its examination. Despite of requests to improve the exploration of multi-scale biomedical data, no major progress has been made in terms of a common strategy combining the state of art in visualization and interaction. This work presents a multimodal approach for a natural biomedical multi-scale exploration. The synergy of a multi-layered visualization environment based on spatial scales with hand gestures and haptic interfaces opens new perspectives for a natural data manipulation.

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Beiträge in Büchern
2014
R. M. Millán Vaquero, J. Rzepecki, K.-I. Friese, F.-E. Wolter
Visualization and User Interaction Methods for Multiscale Biomedical Data
5
N. Magnenat-Thalmann, O. Ratib, and H. F. Choi
Springer London
2014
Beschreibungstext anzeigen

The need for handling huge amounts of data from several sources is becoming increasingly important for biomedical scientists. In the past, there were mainly different modalities in imaging techniques that had to be combined. Those modalities usually measured different physical effects from the same object and shared dimensions and resolution. Nowadays, an increasing number of complex use cases exist in biomedical science and clinical diagnostics that require data from various domains, each one related to a different spatiotemporal scale. Multiscale spatial visualization and interaction can help physicians and scientists to explore and understand this data. In the recent years, the number of published articles on efficient scientist-centric visualization and interaction methods has drastically increased. This chapter describes current techniques on multiscale visualization and user interaction and proposes strategies to accommodate current needs in biomedical data analysis.

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Verschiedene
2012
Wolter, Rzepecki, Millan, Friese
Visualization and Understanding of Medical and Scientific Data
2012