Evaluation of Visualization Approaches in a Biomedical Grid Environment

Advanced visualization technologies are gaining major importance to interpret, present and manipulate high dimensional biomedical data. Since new health technologies are constantly increasing in complexity, adequate information processing is required for diagnostics, therapy planning and treatment. The combination of advanced visualization resources and biomedical grid infrastructures is a promising approach to build dynamic and scalable problem solving environments for such tasks. Visualization then becomes the main issue in system-user interaction, and is therefore a crucial factor in the usefulness of the complete system for the domain researchers. In this paper, two remote visualization approaches to utilize the capabilities of such an environment are presented and evaluated. Evaluation criteria are performance, usability, adaptivity and functionality. Both, an open source and a commercial solution are considered. While the proprietary software shows better performance, the open source solution offers the advantage for seamless grid integration.