2010 IEEE Visualization Contest

Submission procedure:
1) Please visit http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~vis/Tasks/camera.html for a summary of the formatting guidelines for your two-page summary.
2) If you make your paper and video anonymous, we will not make it available at our webpage. Otherwise, all submissions will be published. The winning entry will be published in each case.
3) The 2-page summary, the additional images and the video should be compressed as one single zip archive. Please use the following naming convention: team name, initials of first two authors, e.g. VisCoders_ac_jk.zip
4) Make a MD5 checksum of your zip-file (you may use WinMd5Sum Portable), and put it into a text file, e.g., VisCoders_ac_jk_md5.txt
5) The zip archive and the md5 checksum file have to be uploaded at the given ftp server
6) Once you have submitted your entry send us an email and we will confirm your submission.

Please note that only committee members can view the number of submissions and their contents at the ftp server.

The contest is open to everyone except contest organizers and judges. Sponsors can participate noncompetitive. We invite submissions from individuals or teams, from industry or academia. Our focus is visualization research, not the medical practice of surgical planning, so we do not want participants to try building fully-featured surgical planning applications, or to give advice on how these particular patients should be operated on.

Rather, we encourage participants to demonstrate the prototype of a tool that supports a method or process (hopefully with an interactive component) for understanding this kind of data through analysis and visualization, with the general target of surgical planning.

To demonstrate their approach, participants will submit

(required) A 2-page mini-paper in PDF format describing how the visualization and analysis techniques combined to help answer the driving questions.
(required) Up to 12 additional images (beyond those in the paper) showing how the visualizations help answer the questions.
(encouraged) An Mpeg, AVI, or Quicktime video (duration at most 10 minutes) showing the methods or processes in action. This will be most helpful for demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

The 2-page write-up should not try to give any background information (e.g. about the imaging modality) that will be the same for each contestant. We would like to learn the important information about how the analyses and visualizations were created, by what kind of software, and how long it took to generate the results.

We will not be running any software as part of the evaluations, but hope that the submitted images and video will illustrate how the contestant's methods help answer the driving questions above.

Thus, we encourage participants to broaden their attention from just making a set of visualizations, to a dynamic process for using visualizations for exploration and planning.

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Evaluation Criteria
The evaluation of all submissions will be performed by a team of five renowned neurosurgeons from Germany. The overall technical quality will additionally be rated by a team of Vis-Experts. Strong emphasis will be put on the clinical value of the presented methods and techniques. That is, not the fanciest visualization technique or GPU implementation is key to receiving a good score, but rather the way the method supports the neurosurgeon in answering the guiding questions and enables him to explore and understand the available planning data. From this considerations, it should be obvious that efficient interaction is highly appreciated! The team of domain experts consists of:
	Prof. Dr. med. Alexander Brawanski Director of the Neurosurgical clinic at University Hospital Regensburg, Germany
	Prof. Dr. med. Christopher Nimsky Director of the Neurosurgical clinic at the University Hospital of Marburg, Germany
	Prof. Dr. med. Amir Samii Vice-Director of the Neurosurgical department at the International Neuroscience Institute (INI) Hannover, Germany
	Prof. Dr. med. Ulrich Sure Director of the Neurosurgical clinic at University Hospital Essen/Duisburg, Germany
	Prof. Dr. med. Marcos Tatagiba, Director of the Neurosurgical clinic at the University Hospital of Tübingen, Germany