Notice

Although the demo still runs, this project is no longer under active development. Its functionality has been superseded by various other projects, especially MindSeer, a 3D Visualization tool written in Java.

Demos

On-line demo .

Overview

Brain Visualizer is a web-based interface for our brain visualization and analysis tools. The system consists of a client-side Java applet and a graphics server.

Client side

Java-based web interface is implemented in Java 1.1 (supported by both Netscape 4.x and IE 5.x), with the Swing GUI..Brain Browser applet provides nearly the same functionality as that of our stand-alone Brain Visualizer application, which was developed in order to visualize integrated data from structural MRI, functional MRI and surgical stimulation sites. [Brain Visualizer snapshot]
The figure is a screen shot of the entire desktop with the running applet. The web page that launches the applet is in the lower left, the applet itself is in the upper right, and the Java console is in the lower right. The applet is configured to echo in the Java console all the commands sent to the server. When started, the applet connects to the server and lets the user choose a patient. The server loads MRI 3-D image volumes for anatomy, veins and arteries, and the corresponding 3-D models. The user can then control the server using the GUI shown on the right-hand side of the applet. User interaction with the GUI is translated into a sequence of commands that are sent to the server. For example, in the figure 3 the user has already loaded the CSM sites (small round spheres) and by clicking a button that sends the (xsr-load-map-sites) command to the server, as shown in the Java console window. The user can also click one of the other tabs to access additional controls. The Functional Properties tab brings up controls for manipulating fMRI visualization,visualization properties, and the Viewport Controls tab controls the camera, including rotation and zoom.

Server side

The server is implemented in Skandha4 a general-purpose modular graphics toolkit that we developed (http://sig.biostr.washington.edu/projects/skandha4). The server capabilities of Skandha4 allowed us to implement client-server based web access to these modules. In this mode all computationally intensive tasks are done by the graphics server, which loads and processes image volumes and 3D models, renders 3D scenes, and sends the renderings back to the Java applet. Skandha4 has been used to develop a number of SIG projects, including the Visual Brain Mapper, the Brain Visualizer, and the Dynamic Scene Generator.

Downloads

Sample implementation of the client-side Java applet can be found here:
Brain_Browser.jar.

Skandha4 graphics server documentation and download can be found at Skandha4 web page.

Publications

J. S. Prothero, "Skandha4: An Slisp-based Interactive Raster Graphics Toolkit," technical report draft, 1995.

Last modified: Tue Oct 5 17:28:57 PDT 2004