InkVis: A High-Particle-Count Approach for Visualization of Phase-Contrast Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data

Abstract

Phase-Contrast Magnetic Resonance Imaging (PC-MRI) measures volumetric and time-varying blood flow data, unsurpassed in quality and completeness. Such blood-flow data have been shown to have the potential to improve both diagnosis and risk assessment of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) uniquely. Typically PC-MRI data is visualized using stream- or pathlines. However, time-varying aspects of the data, e.g., vortex shedding, breakdown, and formation, are not sufficiently captured by these visualization techniques. Experimental flow visualization techniques introduce a visible medium, like smoke or dye, to visualize flow aspects including time-varying aspects. We propose a framework that mimics such experimental techniques by using a high number of particles. The framework offers great flexibility which allows for various visualization approaches. These include common traditional flow visualizations, but also streak visualizations to show the temporal aspects, and uncertainty visualizations. Moreover, these patient-specific measurements suffer from noise artifacts and a coarse resolution, causing uncertainty. Traditional flow visualizations neglect uncertainty and, therefore, may give a false sense of certainty, which can mislead the user yielding incorrect decisions. Previously, the domain experts had no means to visualize the effect of the uncertainty in the data. Our framework has been adopted by domain experts to visualize the vortices present in the sinuses of the aorta root showing the potential of the framework. Furthermore, an evaluation among domain experts indicated that having the option to visualize the uncertainty contributed to their confidence on the analysis.