For some time, medicine has been an important driver for the development of data processing and visualization techniques. Improved technology offers the capacity to generate larger and more complex data sets related to imaging and simulation. This, in turn, creates the need for more effective visualization tools for medical practitioners to interpret and utilize data in meaningful ways.
The first edition of Visualization in Medicine and Life Sciences (VMLS) emerged from a workshop convened to explore the significant data visualization challenges created by emerging technologies in the life sciences. The workshop and the book addressed questions of whether medical data visualization approaches can be devised or improved to meet these challenges, with the promise of ultimately being adopted by medical experts.
Visualization in Medicine and Life Sciences II follows the second international VMLS workshop, held in Bremerhaven, Germany, in July 2009. Internationally renowned experts from the visualization and driving application areas came together for this second workshop.
The book presents peer-reviewed research and survey papers which document and discuss the progress made, explore new approaches to data visualization, and assess new challenges and research directions.

Part I Feature Extraction: Discrete Distortion for 3D Data Analysis.- Interactive Visualization ¿ a Key Prerequisite for Reconstruction and Analysis of Anatomically Realistic Neural Networks.- MRI-Based Visualisation and Quantification of Rheumatoid and Psoriatic Arthritis of the Knee.- An Application for the Visualization and Quantification of HIVAssociated Lipodystrophy from Magnetic Resonance Imaging Datasets.- Part II Classification: Semi-automatic Rough Classification of Multichannel Medical Imaging Data.- An Evaluation of Peak Finding for DVR Classification of Biological Data.- Part III Volumes and Shapes: Vessel Visualization with Volume Rendering.- Efficient Selection of Representative Views and Navigation Paths for Volume Data Exploration.- Feature Preserving Smoothing of Shapes using Saliency Skeletons.- Part IV Tensor Visualization: Enhanced DTI tracking with Adaptive Tensor Interpolation.- Image-space Tensor Field Visualization Using a LIC-like Method.- Towards a High-quality Visualization of Higher-order Reynold¿s Glyphs for Diffusion Tensor Imaging.- Part V Visualizing Genes, Proteins, and Molecules: VENLO - Interactive Visual Exploration of Aligned Biological Networks and Their Evolution.- Embedding Biomolecular Information in a Scene Graph System.- Linking Advanced Visualization and MATLAB for the Analysis of 3D Gene Expression Data