Christian Stern
Research Associate MultiMedia Laboratory
Research Projects and Topics:
Virtual Reality in Medicine
The project Non-Invasive Virtual Endo- and Exoscopic Screening for Arterial and Colonic Disease Based on Ultrafast 3D MRI is performed in cooperation with the Department of Medical Radiology, Zurich University Hospital.
The idea is to employ novel image and volume filtering algorithms as well as VR techniques in order to detect colonic
or arterial diseases in an early stage (also denoted as "Virtual Endoscopy"). Based on 3D MRA, the endoluminal aortic stent size and morphology may be determined
interactively.
The MedIS application includes a VR based 3D Visualizer and Volume Rendering components in order to accomplish these tasks.
The Blue-C Project
The MultiMedia Laboratory is participating at the ETH Blue-C project. The research
activities include topics such as
- Virtual Endoscopy based on high performance graphics workstation and the CAVE infrastructure
- Volume Rendering and deformable(flexible) 3D objects
- Tracking devices for Virtual Endoscopy and positioning 3D objects in space
Other MML Blue-C related projects are
- Immersive Exploration of Dynamic Virtual Worlds Generated by L-Systems (in cooperation with Hansrudi Noser)
- Navigating Intuitively within Virtual Worlds using the CyberGlove (in cooperation with Jody Weissmann)
Toolkit for Interactive Molecular Dynamics Simulation and Visualization
Computer simulations of very large many-particle systems open the door to the solution and better understanding of a variety of relevant problems in statistical mechanics, such as nonlinear systems, phase transitions, critical phenomena, percolation, and fractals. The Interactive Molecular Dynamics System (IMDS) is an object-oriented application that allows to simulate and visualize various physical systems in real-time. Computationally intensive tasks are performed using Parallel Distributed Computing (PDC), employing efficient spatial domain decomposition techniques. In order to allow fast model computation in parallel, PDC is used on a cluster of workstations (SGI, SUN, HP, IBM RS/6000) interconnected by a high-speed network (ATM). This is an interdisciplinary project involving Computer Science as well as Physics, supported by Erich Stoll. Scientific applications of IMDS are the simulation of 3D-fractals, crystals and high-temperature super-conductors.
My main research interests:
- Interactive Computer Graphics
- Parallel Distributed Computing (PVM)
- Scientific Computing and Visualization
- 3D-Visualization in Medicine, Volume Rendering
- Object-Oriented programming
- Virtual-Reality
Key-technologies:
- Object-Oriented programming-techniques
- Parallelism (Domain-Decomposition Algorithms, Load-Balancing)
- Dedicated Graphic-Subsystems for Visualization
- Powerful UNIX-workstations
- Client-Server Architectures
- High-Performance Networks (ATM)
Video:
Vorlesung "Scientific Visualization and Virtual Reality" WS04/05:
Address
- University of Zurich
- Department of Computer Science
- MultiMedia Laboratory
- Winterthurerstrasse 190
- CH-8057 Zurich
- Switzerland
- Phone: +41-1-635 67 44
- Fax: +41-1-635 68 09
- Email: stern(at)ifi.unizh.ch
October 15, 2004, Christian Stern