"Visual Computing in Medicine" – 4D-Workshop of the Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence Immune-Mediated Diseases CIMD young scientists program

The third virtual event of the young scientists program took place on May 10th and 11th, 2021 as part of the 4D Workshop series of Fraunhofer CIMD.

The workshop was organized and conducted by the Fraunhofer-Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD. It focused on topics like medical image data, image processing and analysis, visual analytics, models and learning, and augmented reality. The participants consisted of employees of the core institutes of the research cluster (Fraunhofer ITMP, ITEM and IZI) as well as other Fraunhofer-institutes (Fraunhofer IAIS, IAP, IAP-CAN, IGD, IOF and IPA).

Dr. Stefan Wesarg, head of the "Visual Healthcare Technologies" department at Fraunhofer IGD, opened the workshop by welcoming the participants. Afterwards, Prof. Dr. Dieter Fellner, head of Fraunhofer IGD and board member of Fraunhofer CIMD, gave an exciting presentation about the field of work of Fraunhofer IGD, giving the participants an overview of the field of visual computing. Afterwards, Dr. Stefan Wesarg talked about medical imaging, its modalities, its data and visualization, as well as about clinical decision support and medical imaging systems. A short coffee break was followed by a presentation by Matthias Noll, deputy head of the "Visual Healthcare Technologies" department, about the basics and application areas of ultrasound. Andreas Wirtz, research associate of the "Visual Healthcare Technologies" department, then concluded the first day of the workshop with a presentation about model-based methods, which included some application examples.

Day two of the Fraunhofer CIMD 4D Workshop "Visual Computing for Medicine" was again opened by Dr. Stefan Wesarg, followed by an introduction to graphs and networks by Dr. Cristina Oyarzun Laura, research associate of the "Visual Healthcare Technologies" department, in which she explained the necessity of graphs and networks and the basics about neural networks. Afterwards, Tim Alexander Bergmann, research associate of the "Visual Healthcare Technologies" department, gave an introduction to augmented reality and image-guided interventions, taking a closer look at terminology, tracking, visualization and alternative modalities. After a short coffee break, a presentation on visual analytics and longitudinal analysis followed. In this presentation Prof. Dr. Jörn Kohlhammer, head of the "Information Visualization and Visual Analytics" department at Fraunhofer IGD, talked about information visualization, user-centered design, visual analytics, and medical data analysis. This exciting presentation was topped off with a demonstration on cohort analyses and with a demonstration on longitudinal analyses by Jan Burmeister, research associate of the "Information Visualization and Visual Analytics" department.

These two interesting and informative workshop days were altogether a successful virtual continuation of the Fraunhofer CIMD's young scientist program for networking and collaboration among young scientists beyond their current projects and topics.