
David Hagele, Yuxuan Tang, Daniel Weiskopf
Multiple Titles
2024 Bio+MedVis Challenge Winners

This past year's 2024 IEEE Visualization conference hosted the Bio+MedVis Challenge: A meeting of the minds to solve problems around biology, medicine, and visualization. This year’s challenge was organized by the HIDIVE Lab at Harvard Medical School.This VUES seminar features the winners of the Redesign Challenge, where members of the visualization community were tasked with the challenge of proposing alternative visualization approaches that links spot-type proportions to H&E images. Following both short presentations, we'll open up discussion about this topic.
Visual Composition Data Analytics for Spatial Transcriptomics
January 21, 2025
Virtual
ABSTRACT: For the Bio+Med-Vis Challenge 2024, we propose a visual analytics system as a redesign for the scatter pie chart visualization of cell type proportions of spatial transcriptomics data. Our design uses three linked views: a view of the histological image of the tissue, a stacked bar chart showing cell type proportions of the spots, and a scatter plot showing a dimensionality reduction of the multivariate proportions. Furthermore, we apply a compositional data analysis framework, the Aitchison geometry, to the proportions for dimensionality reduction and k-means clustering. Leveraging brushing and linking, the system allows one to explore and uncover patterns in the cell type mixtures and relate them to their spatial locations on the cellular tissue. This redesign shifts the pattern recognition workload from the human visual system to computational methods commonly used in visual analytics. We provide the code and setup instructions of our visual analytics system on GitHub.