  Electronic health records (EHR) systematically represent patient data in
digital form. However, text and visualization based EHR systems are poorly
integrated in the hospital workflow due to their complex and rather
non-intuitive access structure. This is especially disadvantageous in clinical
cooperative situations that require an efficient, task specific information
transfer.
  In this paper we introduce a novel concept of anatomically integrated
in-place visualization designed to engage with cooperative tasks on a
neurosurgical ward. Based on the findings of our field studies and the derived
design goals, we propose an approach that follows a visual tradition in
medicine, which is tightly related with anatomy, by using a virtual patient's
body as spatial representation of visually encoded abstract medical data. More
specifically, we provide a generic set of formal requirements for these kinds
of in-place visualizations, we apply these requirements in order to achieve a
specific visualization of neurological symptoms related to the differential
diagnosis of spinal disc herniation, and we present a prototypical
implementation of the visualization concept on a mobile device. Moreover, we
discuss various challenges related to visual encoding and visibility of the
body model components. Finally, the prototype is evaluated by 10 neurosurgeons,
who assess the validity and the further potential of the proposed approach.
