HEREDITARY Shines at IEEE VIS 2024: TU Graz’s Award-Winning Visualization Technique

In the framework of Work Package 5: Visual Analytics and Interaction, Graz University of Technology (WP5 leader) presented the poster DROPLETS: A Marker Design for visually enhancing Local Cluster Associations on Sunday 13 October as part of a submission to the Bio+MedVis Challenge at IEEE VIS 2024.

The research of TU Graz, focused on the visualisation of high dimensional data, received an award for the novelty and innovative Visualization technique design. It was presented by Stefan Lengauer in a virtual format, who is one of the authors along with Peter Waldert and Tobias Schreck. The summary poster, the full publication, the video presentation and the source code for generating the Droplets layout are available and can be consulted.

This year’s objective of the Bio+MedVis Challenge was to redesign an existing visualization of multi-cell gene expressions of tissue samples. In this, multiple cells are accumulated into pixels. For each pixel, the visualization should convey the prevalence and extent of cell types it is composed of in a proportional relation. The provided baseline technique of superimposed Pie charts limits the perception of regions with coherent cell-type compositions, which constitutes one of the essential visual analytics tasks.

As a response, TU Graz proposed a novel marker design: DROPLETS, a space-saving design for visually enhancing the presence of clusters and regional borders. This concept was evaluated for the given tissue sample and compared with the given baseline and other alternatives.

About the IEEE VIS 2024

IEEE VIS 2024 was the year’s premier forum for advances in theory, methods, and applications of visualization and visual analytics. The conference convened an international community of researchers and practitioners from universities, government, and industry to exchange recent findings on the design and use of visualization tools.

Join us and TU Graz to learn more about Hereditary Project and how visualization techniques help to face the critical challenge of leveraging multimodal health data.