Research Associate Sujal Bista Receives IEEE SciVis Best Paper Award

Sujal Bista, a research associate in UMIACS, will be honored with a Best Paper Award at the annual IEEE Conference on Scientific Visualization (SciVis), to be held Nov. 9–14 in Paris.

Bista’s paper on visualization of diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI) tensors for understanding the brain microstructure was chosen from 136 submissions, of which 34 were accepted for presentation at the conference.

The winning paper explores the use of spherical harmonics illumination in visually exploring and analyzing dense spatio-angular fields in the human brain. Bista believes the effectiveness of this approach over current state-of-the-art techniques (mean diffusion, fractional anisotropy, and principal diffusion direction color maps) can help medical experts better identify changes in the brain microstructure due to causes like severe to mild traumatic brain injuries, frontal lobe damage and tumors.

“We are extremely proud of Sujal’s work—he has shown exceptional talent in his research and scholarship since he arrived at Maryland almost 12 years ago as an undergraduate,” says Amitabh Varshney, director of UMIACS.

Bista completed his bachelor of science, master of science and doctoral degree—all in computer science—at UMD.

Co-authors on the winning paper were Rao Gullapalli and Jiachen Zhuo—both radiologists at the University of Maryland, Baltimore—and Varshney, who served as Bista’s doctoral adviser.

The IEEE SciVis conference is considered the most prestigious conference in the field of computer visualization, covering scientific visualization, information visualization and visual analytics. It attracts more than 1,000 participants annually.