Illustrative Visualization

Scientific illustration is concerned with researching ways in which complex biological and medical data can be abstracted in order to convey a desired information that would otherwise be impossible or hard to retrieve from the original data. Illustrators apply such techniques, for instance, to present non-important parts of an organ in a simplified way, while using detailed representations to put the focus of attention on a region where a tumor might be situated. To identify such meaningful visual abstractions for visualization, their effectiveness for human perception and cognition has to be assessed, and they have to be formalized in order to make them applicable in rendering algorithms. In this project, we try to advance the understanding of procedural visual abstraction of complex physiological processes that describe the complex machinery of biological life.