Helping high schoolers move the (virtual) world.

In a workshop, high school students built a virtual world for a car-racing game. The prerequisites were math-rather than programming-skills; instructional scaffolding (OpenGL templates and tutors) aided students through their programming tasks. This workshop was an alternative to other measures (for example, Microsoft's recent campaign) to get high school students interested in computer science.

How visualization courses have changed over the past 10 years.

The past 10 years have seen profound changes in visualization algorithms, techniques, methodologies, and applications. These changes are forcing alterations to visualization courses. Unfortunately, outdated course content recommendations, together with profound changes in the underlying technology and methodology, are producing an unstable ground for educators at a time when visual representations are becoming increasingly important. To address this issue, educators held meetings or workshops at Siggraph 2011 and 2012 and a panel and workshop at Eurographics 2012. This article presents the insights gathered at these events.

Quantitative myocardial perfusion PET combined with coronary anatomy derived from CT angiography: validation of a new fusion and visualisation software.

AIM: Dynamic perfusion PET offers a clinical relevant advantage over myocardial perfusion scintigraphy due to its ability to measure myocardial blood flow quantitatively. This leads to an improved detection of multivessel disease and the possibility to assess not only the culprit lesion but lower grade stenoses as well. For appropriate revascularization, perfusion defects must be matched to coronary lesions. It has been shown that image fusion of morphological and functional images is superior to side-by-side analysis. Still, software for quantitative perfusion PET combined with CT angiography is rare. In this paper we present a new software tool for image fusion and visualization of quantitative perfusion PET and coronary morphology derived from CT angiography. METHODS: In our software, a PET uptake image is used for manual co-registration. Co-registration results are then applied to the functional data derived from compartment modelling. To evaluate the reproducibility of the manual co-registration, we calculated the deviation between a series of manual co-registrations performed on nine pairs of unregistered PET and CT datasets by five trained participants. Two dimensional transfer functions were used to highlight the coronary arteries from the CT study in the combined data sets. RESULTS: The average Euclidian distances for three references points were between 3.7 and 4.1 mm. The maximum distance was 10.6 mm. By the use of the two dimensional transfer functions, coronary anatomy could be easily visualised either by user-interaction or automatically by use of neuronal networks. CONCLUSIONS: With this approach it is possible to combine quantitative perfusion PET with coronary anatomy derived from CT angiography. Our first experiences indicate that manual image fusion with our tool is reproducible and that visualisation of the combined datasets is achieved within short time.