Curriculum Vitae of Tim Peeters

Tim Peeters was born on the 1st of June 1979, in Echt, The Netherlands. He completed VWO (pre-university education) at the Bisschoppelijk College Echt in 1997. In the same year, he started a combined first-year studies in technical computer science and applied mathematics at Eindhoven University of Technology. After the first year he continued the computer science studies for which he received his Master of Science degree in 2004. His Master's thesis was titled Interactive Visualization of Annotated DNA Sequences.

In November 2004 he started his PhD research in the Biomedical Image Analysis group of the department of Biomedical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology. His research focus was the visualization of diffusion MRI data. He published about various new visualization methods for this data and developed a visualization tool that is used within and outside the research group where the work was done.

After succesfully defending his PhD thesis in December 2009, he was appointed as a postdoc/scientific progrogrammer in the same group to continue his research and build a new software tool that can be used by researchers, collaborators and students to visualize diffusion MRI data. He is still working in this position.

Theses

• T.H.J.M. Peeters. GPU-based Visualization Techniques for the Interactive Exploration of Diffusion MRI Data. PhD Thesis. Eindhoven, 2009.
• T.H.J.M. Peeters. Interactive Visualization of Annotated DNA Sequences. Master Thesis. Eindhoven, 2004.

Book chapters

• T.H.J.M. Peeters, P.R. Rodrigues, A. Vilanova, and B.M. ter Haar Romeny. Visualization and Processing of Tensor Fields: Advances and Perspectives, chapter Analysis of distance/similarity measures for Diffusion Tensor Imaging. In Springer Verlag series Mathematics and Visualization, Editors: D.H. Laidlaw and J. Weickert, pages 113--136, 2008.

Refereed journal publications

• V. Prčkovska, T.H.J.M. Peeters, M. van Almsick, A. Vilanova and B.M. ter Haar Romeny. Fused DTI/HARDI Visualization. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2010.
• M. van Almsick, T.H.J.M. Peeters, V. Prčkovska, A. Vilanova and B.M. ter Haar Romeny. Fast Glyph Rendering of Spherical Functions. To be published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2010.
• T.H.J.M. Peeters, A. Vilanova and B.M. ter Haar Romeny. Interactive Fiber Structure Visualization of the Heart. In Computer Graphics Forum 28(8), pages 2140--2150, 2009.
• G.J. Strijkers, A. Bouts, W.M. Blankesteijn, T.H.J.M. Peeters, A. Vilanova, M. van Prooijen, H.M.H.F. Sanders, E. Heijman, K. Nicolay. Diffusion tensor imaging of left ventricular remodeling in response to myocardial infarction in the mouse. In NMR in Biomedicine 22(2), pages 182--90, 2009.
• M.W.E.J. Fiers, H.M.M. van de Wetering, T.H.J.M. Peeters, J.J. Van Wijk, J.P.H. Nap. DNAVis: interactive visualization of comparative genome annotations. In Bioinformatics 22(3) pages 354--355, 2005.

Refereed conference publications

• T.H.J.M. Peeters, V. Prčkovska, M. van Almsick, A. Vilanova and B.M. ter Haar Romeny. Fast and Sleek Glyph Rendering for Interactive HARDI Data Exploration. In IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium, pages 153--160 and cover image, Beijing, China, 2009.
• T.H.J.M. Peeters, V. Prčkovska, M. van Almsick, A. Vilanova Bartroli, B.M. ter Haar Romeny. Fast and sleek glyph rendering for interactive HARDI data exploration. In Proceedings of Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI), Zeewolde, The Netherlands, 2009.
• T.H.J.M. Peeters, A. Vilanova and B.M. ter Haar Romeny. GPU-based visualization of dense 3D vector fields. In Proceedings of Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI), pages 169--176, Heijen, The Netherlands, 2008.
• T.H.J.M. Peeters, A. Vilanova, G.J. Strijkers, B.M. ter Haar Romeny. Visualization of the Fibrous Structure of the Heart. In Proceedings of Vision, Modeling, and Visualization (VMV), pages 309--316, Aachen, Germany, 2006.
• T.H.J.M. Peeters, A. Vilanova, B.M. ter Haar Romeny. Visualization of DTI fibers using hair-rendering techniques, in Proceedings of Twelfth Annual Conference of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI), pages 66--73, Lommel, Belgium, 2006.
• T.H.J.M. Peeters, H.M.M. van de Wetering, M.W.E.J. Fiers, J.P.H. Nap, J.J. Van Wijk. Case Study: Visualization of annotated DNA sequences. In VisSym 2004, symposium on Visualization, pages 109--114, 345. Editors: O. Deussen, C. Hansen, D. Keim, D. Saupe. Konstanz, Germany, 2004.

Refereed abstracts

• G.J. Strijkers, A. Bouts, E. Heijman, M. Blankesteijn, T.H.J.M. Peeters, A. Vilanova, K. Nicolay. Diffusion Tensor Imaging of Left Ventricular Remodeling in Response to Myocardial Infarction in the Mouse. In Proceedings of the joint annual meeting ISMRM/ESMRMB, Berlin, Germany, 2007.
• T.H.J.M. Peeters, A. Vilanova, G.J. Strijkers, B.M. ter Haar Romeny. Visualization of the Fibrous Structure of the Heart. In First Dutch Conference on Bio-Medical Engineering, page 105, Egmond aan Zee, The Netherlands, 2007.

Conference posters

• V. Prčkovska, T.H.J.M. Peeters, A. Vilanova and B.M. ter Haar Romeny. Spherical HARMonics INteractive GPU-based (SHARMING) tools for fused DTI/HARDI visualization, EuroVis, Berlin, Germany, 2009.
• P.R. Rodrigues, V. Prčkovska, T.H.J.M. Peeters, A. Vilanova and B.M. ter Haar Romeny. DTITool: An Insightful look into Diffusion Tensor Images, EuroVis, Berlin, Germany, 2009.

GPU-based Visualization Techniques for the Interactive Exploration of Diffusion MRI Data

In December 2009 I succesfully concluded my PhD research, which was done in the BioMedical Image Analysis group of Prof. Bart ter Haar Romeny under the supervision of Dr. Anna Vilanova. The topics of my PhD project include:

• Research on the visualization of diffusion MRI data of healthy and ischemic hearts, in order to increase the understanding of the working of the heart and to develop better treatment for diseases such as cardiac ischemia and heart failure.
• Visualization of Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data in general, but mainly brain data, focussing on improving the visual perception of complex fiber structures that were extracted from the data using fiber tracking, and do display the raw data using glyphs.
• New methods for rendering glyphs to represent the tensors from DTI and probability density functions (PDF) and orientation density functions (ODF) from diffusion-weighted MRI scans of human brains.
• Development of our own tool called DTITool which is used for the visualization of DTI and HARDI (High-Angular resolution diffusion imaging) data. I made the architectural design of the software, and did most of the programming. All our visualization methods are implemented as filters and mappers in VTK which we glue together with a graphical user-interface created using Qt.
• For new visualization methods I exploit the capabilities of recent generations of graphics cards in order to make the visualizations faster, more interactive, and better looking in such a way that they help the users of the tools that I develop in acquiring a better insight in both the datasets as a whole and in the details in selected regions of the data.

Interactive Visualization of Annotated DNA Sequences

For one year I worked on the visualization of DNA sequences and their annotations (which can specify, e.g., where certain genes are encoded in the sequence) in the Visualization group of Prof. Dr. Ir. Jack van Wijk. Because these are very large datasets, a good visualization tool was needed to investigate them. After studying molecular biology and investigating existing tools, I created a new tool called DNAVis. This tool makes it possible to interactively view and compare annotated DNA sequences. DNAVis makes use of existing visualization techniques such as linked windows, perspective walls and semantic zooming.

The biologists of Plant Research International (PRI) received DNAVis with great enthusiasm. They will use the tool and further develop it together with the visualization group of Prof. Jack van Wijk of the department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the TUE. DNAVis and my report can be downloaded from www.win.tue.nl/dnavis. The project also resulted in an article that was accepted for VisSym '04 and published in Joint Eurographics - IEEE TCVG Symposium on Visualization (VisSym 2004), pp. 109-114, 345.

Volume Visualization in EasyScil with VTK

For the group Biomedical Imaging and Informatics of the department of Biomedische Engineering of the TUE I worked for three months on a C++ library that makes several visualization methods of VTK (The Visualization Toolkit) available for EasyScil, the development environment for EasyVision (now ViewForum) of Philips Medical Systems.

DigLib

The goal of this project was to gain experience in project management in larger software projects. In 6 months we developed with a group of 9 students a system named DigLib for Océ. DigLib is a document management system that can store, view, index/search and categorize groups of documents in different formats (e.g. PDF, TIFF). Users with different roles can connect to the system via an intranet and/or internet environment.

In the development of DigLib, I was responsible for the implementation of a web-based user interface using JSP and Java servlets, quality management, and I shared responsibility for the design of the system.

Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE)

Bisschoppelijk College Echt

• Dutch: Mother tongue
• English: Proficient user in reading, writing, speech.
• German: Independent user in reading and speech. Basic writing skills.

• Programming languages: C++, GLSL, Java, Delphi, Python
• Libraries and toolkits: OpenGL, VTK, Qt, FLTK, Boost
• Operating systems: Linux (Slackware, Ubuntu, others), Microsoft Windows (95, 98, 2000, XP), Mac OS X (10.6), FreeBSD
• Development tools: Vim, GCC, CMake, CVS, Subversion, Microsoft Visual C++ (.NET 2003, 2005 Express), Java 2 SDK
• Documentation: Latex, Doxygen, Javadoc, HTML, DocBook

• Martial arts: Karate since 1991; black belt since 2000 and 2nd degree black belt since 2003, aikido (2003-2006) and others.
• Dancing (zouk since 2008)
• Fitness (since 2007).
• Digital photography.