Visualization technology has become a crucial component of medical and b- medical data processing and analysis. This technology complements tra- tional image processing methods as it allows scientists and practicing medical doctors to visually interact with large, high-resolution three-dimensional - age data. Further, an ever increasing number of new data acquisition me- ods is being used in medicine and the life sciences, in particular in genomics and proteomics. The book contains papers discussing some of the latest data processing and visualization techniques and systems for e?ective...

The goal of visualization is the accurate, interactive, and intuitive presentation of data. Complex numerical simulations, high-resolution imaging devices and incre- ingly common environment-embedded sensors are the primary generators of m- sive data sets. Being able to derive scienti?c insight from data increasingly depends on having mathematical and perceptual models to provide the necessary foundation for effective data analysis and comprehension. The peer-reviewed state-of-the-art research papers included in this book focus on continuous data models, such as is common in medical imaging...

The book discusses novel visualization techniques driven by the needs in medicine and life sciences as well as new application areas and challenges for visualization within these fields.

The nature of the physical Universe has been increasingly better understood in recent years, and cosmological concepts have undergone a rapid evolution (see, e.g., 11], 2], or 5]). Although there are alternate theories, it is generally believed that the large-scale relationships and homogeneities that we see can only be explainedby having the universe expand suddenlyin a very early "in?ationary" period. Subsequent evolution of the Universe is described by the Hubble expansion, the observation that the galaxies are ?ying away from each other. We can attribute di?erent rates of this...

For some time, medicine has been an important driver for the development of data processing and visualization techniques. The workshop and the book addressed questions of whether medical data visualization approaches can be devised or improved to meet these challenges, with the promise of ultimately being adopted by medical experts.