Communicating Pathologies and Growth to a General Audience

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the suitability of different visual representations of pathological growth using surface models of intracranial aneurysms and liver tumors. By presenting complex medical information in a visually accessible manner, audiences can better understand and comprehend the progression of pathological structures. Previous work in medical visualization provides an extensive design space for visualizing medical image data. However, determining which visualization techniques are appropriate for a general audience has not been thoroughly investigated. We conducted a user study (n = 60) to evaluate different visual representations in terms of their suitability for solving tasks and their aesthetics. We created surface models representing the evolution of pathological structures over multiple discrete time steps and visualized them using illumination-based and illustrative techniques. Our results indicate that the suitability of visualization techniques depends on the task at hand. Users' aesthetic preferences largely coincide with their preferred visualization technique for task-solving purposes.