Effective Visual Exploration of Hemodynamics in Cerebral Aneurysms

Abstract

Cerebral aneurysms are a pathological vessel dilatation that bear a high risk of rupture. For the understanding of this risk, the analysis of hemodynamic information plays an important role in clinical research. These information are obtained by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. Thus, an effective visual exploration of patient-specific blood flow behavior in cerebral aneurysms was developed to support the domain experts in their investigation process. We present advanced visualization and interaction techniques, which provide an overview, focus-and-context views as well as multi-level explorations. Moreover, an automatic extraction process of qualitative flow characteristics, which are correlated with the risk of rupture is introduced. Although not established in clinical routine yet, interviews and informal user studies confirm the usefulness of these methods.