How Visualization Can Enable Understanding

The good folks at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) have developed an animation that helps to communicate the science of "vulnerable plaques" to the doctors, scientists, students, industry professionals and patients who need to understand it.

Two-thirds of all heart attacks are caused by something known as vulnerable plaques, which are fatty lipid pool deposits in the inner layer of the arterial wall.

This work was accomplished with the help of sophisticated visualization expertise and techniques from TACC and their Faculty Innovation Center.

"Modeling these very complicated systems involves solving millions of equations each time step, and for millions of time steps, so the computational burden is enormous," Hughes said. "For a computational institute like ICES, having an advanced computing center like TACC available is a platform for all of our research," said Thomas Hughes, a professor at The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Computational and Engineering Sciences.

Read more here.

From http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/press-releases/2012/tacc-aids-cardiovascular-disease-research