This collaborative research brings together computer scientists from University of Southern Mississippi (USM) and Brown University and neuroscientists from the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) to study the design of a scientific visualization language (SVL). Despite the numerous visualization approaches already devised, visualization remains more of an art than a science. Grounded in theories and methods from human-centered computing, machine learning, and cognitive psychology, this work is to develop and evaluate a scientific visualization language (SVL) to provide a principled way to help scientists understand how and why visualizations work. Tools and theories developed in this project can lead to efficient knowledge discovery to help neuroscientists study brains using diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTI).
This work has the following specific objectives and outcomes: (1) close collaboration with scientists to discover, refine, and verify a symbol space, (2) a semantic space that describes the relationship among symbols, (3) a testbed that implements SVL for neuroscientists to compose visualizations, (4) development of new and enhanced courses at University of Southern Mississippi and Brown University, and (5) wide dissemination of the research outcomes through open-source software, experimental data, open labs, publications, and presentations.
This project is expected to have broad impact. It may lead to significantly better approaches to human knowledge discovery and decision making in many disciplines where visualizations have found successful application, including neuroscience, biomedicine, bioinformatics, biology, chemistry, geosciences, business, economics, and education. Undergraduate and graduate students are expected to participate in the research through our courses, and student exchanges are planned between USM and Brown. K-12 students can visit the USM lab while the project is in progress. Software and results will be disseminated via the project Web site (https://sites.google.com/site/simplevisualizationlanguage).
Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DMRI) is a type of medical imaging method that is designed to map of the diffusion process of molecules, mainly water, in biological tissue. In the neuroscience research community, DMRI has been used to visualize the white matter fibers of the brain as well as it is pathology. The overall goals of this project are to design and evaluate a scientific visualization language to understand why and how visualization works and to design appropriate interaction techniques to support the dynamic nature of visualization workflow in diffusion MRI (DMRI) analyses. Through this three-year collaborative project, a novel interactive toolkits has been developed and key questions have been addressed which included, but not limited to, the effect of coloring, Semiotics-based ranking, lighting design, etc. Our summary of the current state-of-the-art visualization techniques in terms of design scenarios provides a guideline for researchers to learn the evaluation methods. Design guidelines and tools from this research may have profound impact on the visualization design choices for visualization designers. The toolkits we have developed may suggest novel design of interactive multifaceted data visualization. Design principles are useful to guide visualization software. Our understanding of multimodality imaging of structural and functional MRIs will help many other brain scientists analyze their data. Our semiotics approach for evaluating DMRI visualizations may provide new tools for scientists and engineers to quantitatively evaluate proposed workflows outside of brain visualization. Our design of the workflow environment making use of the virtual space may eventually lead to effective uses of high resolution yet smaller size displays. Neuroscientists and clinicians working on the project have obtained valuable experience and skills in developing medical imaging visualization tools by collaborating with computer scientists. Part of the program developed within this project has been used for first year medical school students to understand brain anatomical structures and tractograpy approach. Please refer the link below for details of the project activities, investigators and publications. https://sites.google.com/site/simplevisualizationlanguage/
