COMFIS - Comparative Visualization of Simulated Medical Flow Data

Abstract

Simulations of human blood and airflow are playing an increasing role in personalized medicine. Comparing flow data of different treatment scenarios or before and after an intervention is important to assess treatment options and success. However, existing visualization tools are either designed for the evaluation of a single data set or limit the comparison to a few partial aspects such as scalar fields defined on the vessel wall or internal flow patterns. Therefore, we present COMFIS, a system for the comparative visual analysis of two simulated medical flow data sets, e.g. before and after an intervention. We combine various visualization and interaction methods for comparing different aspects of the underlying, often time-dependent data. These include comparative views of different scalar fields defined on the vessel/mucous wall, comparative depictions of the underlying volume data, and comparisons of flow patterns. We evaluated COMFIS with CFD engineers and medical experts, who were able to efficiently find interesting data insights that help to assess treatment options.