Efficacy of 3D visualization in mobile apps for patient education regarding orthognathic surgery

‘Sur-face’ is an interactive mobile app illustrating different orthognathic surgeries and their potential complications. This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of Sur-face by comparing two methods of delivering patient information on orthognathic surgeries and their related potential complications: a mobile app with interactive 3D animations and a voice recording containing verbal instructions only. For each method, the participants’ acquired knowledge was assessed using a custom-designed questionnaire. Participants in the ‘app’ group performed significantly better (P<0.0034) than those in the ‘voice’ group and retained more knowledge, suggesting that interactive visualizations play a key role in improving understanding of the orthognathic surgical procedure and its associated complications. This study emphasizes the impact of 3D visualizations in delivering information regarding orthognathic surgery and highlights the advantage of delivering validated patient information through mobile apps

Single view vs. multiple views scatterplots

Among all the available visualization tools, the scatterplot has been deeply analyzed through the years and many researchers investigated how to improve this tool to face new challenges. The scatterplot visualization diagram is considered one of the most functional among the variety of data visual representations, due to its relative simplicity compared to other multivariable visualization techniques. Even so, one of the most significant and unsolved challenge in data visualization consists in effectively displaying datasets with many attributes or dimensions, such as multidimensional or multivariate ones. The focus of this research is to compare the single view and the multiple views visualization paradigms for displaying multivariable dataset using scatterplots. A multivariable scatterplot has been developed as a web application to provide the single view tool, whereas for the multiple views visualization, the ScatterDice web app has been slightly modified and adopted as a traditional, yet interactive, scatterplot matrix. Finally, a taxonomy of tasks for visualization tools has been chosen to define the use case and the tests to compare the two paradigms

Augmented reality visualization and edition of cognitive workflow capturing

The aim of the COGNITO project is to design a personal assistance system, in which Augmented Reality (AR) is used to support users in task solving and manipulation of objects. Due to its sensing and learning capability, the COGNITO system automatically creates workflow references by observing a shown task in learning mode. After the workflow has been learnt, the system can be run in playback mode, in which it explains the previously learnt task to the operator. The system compares the user activity in real-time with the workflow reference and provides adequate feedback. This system is composed by four main modules. This paper focuses on the last module – the 3D graphics engine – which is the basis to the development of both the augmented and the virtual reality player. Additionally, it also presents the template of actions editor which is an editing tool that enables non-programmers and non-3D-experts to prepare and accompany the composition of visualizations for end-users