Visually comparing brain networks, or connectomes, is an essential task in the field of neuroscience. Especially relevant to the field of clinical neuroscience, group studies that examine differences between populations or changes over time within a population enable neuroscientists to reason about effective diagnoses and treatments for a range of neuropsychiatric disorders. In this paper, we specifically explore how visual analytics tools can be used to facilitate various clinical neuroscience tasks, in which observation and analysis of meaningful patterns in the connectome can support patient diagnosis and treatment. We conduct a survey of visualization tasks that enable clinical neuroscience activities, and further explore how existing connectome visualization tools support or fail to support these tasks. Based on our investigation of these tasks, we introduce a novel visualization tool, NeuroCave, to support group studies analyses. We discuss how our design decisions (the use of immersive visualization, the use of hierarchical clustering and dimensionality reduction techniques, and the choice of visual encodings) are motivated by these tasks. We evaluate NeuroCave through two use cases that illustrate the utility of interactive connectome visualization in clinical neuroscience contexts. In the first use case, we study sex differences using functional connectomes and discover hidden connectome patterns associated with well-known cognitive differences in spatial and verbal abilities. In the second use case, we show how the utility of visualizing the brain in different topological space coupled with clustering information can reveal the brain's intrinsic structure.
While most commonly used visualization tools are dedicated desktop applications, web-based implementations, such as @cite_4 or @cite_15 , free the user from being attached to a specific operating system @cite_52 . is also a web-based application and runs in any modern browser. The use of stereoscopic techniques can provide a more immersive way to explore brain imaging data @cite_9 , H "a find that healthcare professionals perceive the increased dimensionality provided by stereoscopy as beneficial for understanding depth in the displayed scenery @cite_53 . Moreover, Ware and Mitchell find that the use of stereographic visualizations reduces the perception error rate in graph perception for large graphs with more than 500 nodes @cite_6 , and @cite_0 observed that, when coupled with highlighting, stereoscopic representations of 3D graphs outperformed their non-immersive counterpart. lets the user move between desktop and VR environments for interactively exploring 3D connectomes.
@cite_4 @cite_9 @cite_53 @cite_52 @cite_6 @cite_0 @cite_15
2029721696 2148058475 2087973838 1970022459 2103573098 2113506774
We introduce NeuroCave, a novel immersive visualization system that facilitates the visual inspection of structural and functional connectome datasets. The representation of the human connectome as a graph enables neuroscientists to apply network-theoretic approaches in order to explore its complex characteristics. With NeuroCave, brain researchers can interact with the connectome— either in a standard desktop environment or while wearing portable VR headsets (such as Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear, or Google Daydream VR platforms)— in any coordinate system or topological space, as well as cluster brain regions into different modules on demand. Furthermore, a default side-by-side layout enables simultaneous, synchronized manipulation in 3D, utilizing modern GPU hardware architecture, and facilitates comparison tasks across different subjects or diagnostic groups or longitudinally within the same subject. Visual clutter is mitigated using a state-of-the-art edge bundling technique and through an interactive lay... Scholars are increasingly citing electronic “web references” which are not preserved in libraries or full text archives. WebCite is a new standard for citing web references. To “webcite” a document involves archiving the cited Web page through www.webcitation.org and citing the WebCite permalink instead of (or in addition to) the unstable live Web page. This journal has amended its “instructions for authors” accordingly, asking authors to archive cited Web pages before submitting a manuscript. Almost 200 other journals are already using the system. We discuss the rationale for WebCite, its technology, and how scholars, editors, and publishers can benefit from the service. Citing scholars initiate an archiving process of all cited Web references, ideally before they submit a manuscript. Authors of online documents and websites which are expected to be cited by others can ensure that their work is permanently available by creating an archived copy using WebCite and providing the citation information including the WebCite link on their Web document(s). Editors should ask their authors to cache all cited Web addresses (Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs) “prospectively” before submitting their manuscripts to their journal. Editors and publishers should also instruct their copyeditors to cache cited Web material if the author has not done so already. Finally, WebCite can process publisher submitted “citing articles” (submitted for example as eXtensible Markup Language [XML] documents) to automatically archive all cited Web pages shortly before or on publication. Finally, WebCite can act as a focussed crawler, caching retrospectively references of already published articles. Copyright issues are addressed by honouring respective Internet standards (robot exclusion files, no-cache and no-archive tags). Long-term preservation is ensured by agreements with libraries and digital preservation organizations. The resulting WebCite Index may also have applications for research assessment exercises, being able to measure the impact of Web services and published Web documents through access and Web citation metrics. @PARASPLIT [J Med Internet Res 2005;7(5):e60] It has been known for some time that larger graphs can be interpreted if laid out in 3D and displayed with stereo and or motion depth cues to support spatial perception. However, prior studies were carried out using displays that provided a level of detail far short of what the human visual system is capable of resolving. Therefore, we undertook a graph comprehension study using a very high resolution stereoscopic display. In our first experiment, we examined the effect of stereoscopic display, kinetic depth, and using 3D tubes versus lines to display the links. The results showed a much greater benefit for 3D viewing than previous studies. For example, with both motion and stereoscopic depth cues, unskilled observers could see paths between nodes in 333 node graphs with less than a 10p error rate. Skilled observers could see up to a 1000-node graph with less than a 10p error rate. This represented an order of magnitude increase over 2D display. In our second experiment, we varied both nodes and links to understand the constraints on the number of links and the size of graph that can be reliably traced. We found the difference between number of links and number of nodes to best account for error rates and suggest that this is evidence for a “perceptual phase transition.” These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for information display. In this paper we present a new technique and prototype graph visualization system, stereoscopic highlighting, to help answer accessibility and adjacency queries when interacting with a node-link diagram. Our technique utilizes stereoscopic depth to highlight regions of interest in a 2D graph by projecting these parts onto a plane closer to the viewpoint of the user. This technique aims to isolate and magnify specific portions of the graph that need to be explored in detail without resorting to other highlighting techniques like color or motion, which can then be reserved to encode other data attributes. This mechanism of stereoscopic highlighting also enables focus+context views by juxtaposing a detailed image of a region of interest with the overall graph, which is visualized at a further depth with correspondingly less detail. In order to validate our technique, we ran a controlled experiment with 16 subjects comparing static visual highlighting to stereoscopic highlighting on 2D and 3D graph layouts for a range of tasks. Our results show that while for most tasks the difference in performance between stereoscopic highlighting alone and static visual highlighting is not statistically significant, users performed better when both highlighting methods were used concurrently. In more complicated tasks, 3D layout with static visual highlighting outperformed 2D layouts with a single highlighting method. However, it did not outperform the 2D layout utilizing both highlighting techniques simultaneously. Based on these results, we conclude that stereoscopic highlighting is a promising technique that can significantly enhance graph visualizations for certain use cases.