Overview of Visualization in Biology and Medicine - Scientific Visualization: Uncertainty, Multifield, Biomedical, and Scalable Visualization - page 201

Chapter 20
Overview of Visualization in Biology
and Medicine

Arie E. Kaufman, Gerik Scheuermann and Jos B.T.M. Roerdink

Similar to all other areas of visualization, visualization in biology and medicine is
driven to a large extent by developments in the application domain itself. In recent
years, new experimental techniques have increased measured data by orders of mag-
nitude. These technological improvements continue to change biomedical research,
and consequently, biomedical visualization. Thus far, there is no end in sight to
this continuous challenge. One special aspect in this development is that biomedical
research uses more and more heterogeneous data which need to be integrated to
gain insight. This requires visualization systems that deal with these different data
types and provide a unified view of this variety of aspects of the same problem.
Especially, we continue to see measured images (but with an enormous increase in
resolution), networks (with rapid updates and increasing size), electromagnetic sig-
nals, simulations of partial differential equations, and rapidly increasing genomics
data that are partially or all present in typical application scenarios. Publicly available
databases enhance this trend substantially, since the data in an application scenario
typically comes only partially from measurements and simulations of the researcher
or medical doctor—the rest of the picture comes from databases. In addition, most
modern research in life sciences requires consideration of different scales spanning
many orders of magnitude in space and time. Furthermore, we see the ongoing
trend of data analysis and data cleaning incorporated into the visualization process.
Overall, we observe that visualization has become a key technology for larger parts

( B )
Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, New York, USA
e-mail: [e-mail]
G. Scheuermann
Institute of Computer Science, University of Leipzig, P.O. Box 100920, 04009 Leipzig, Germany
e-mail: [e-mail]
J.B.T.M. Roerdink
Johann Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Groningen,
P.O. Box 407, 9700 AK Groningen, The Netherlands
e-mail: [e-mail]

A.E. Kaufman