. ConnectomeExplorer enables the interactive visual analysis of large data volumes in connectomics research, integrating 3D volume data of brain tissue and segmented objects, connectivity of cells and neurites, and additional meta data. A powerful query algebra allows neuroscientists to pose domain-specific questions in an intuitive manner, and to interactively analyze the results. We show a teravoxel volume via (left) a tree widget of segmented objects, a 3D volume view, a connectivity graph of neurites (axons and dendrites), a visual query builder for dynamic query specification, and a statistics view at the bottom; (right) visualization of a dynamically specified region of interest (top: all neuronal objects in a cylindrical region; bottom: only the spines of the red dendrite). Abstract-This paper presents ConnectomeExplorer, an application for the interactive exploration and query-guided visual analysis of large volumetric electron microscopy (EM) data sets in connectomics research. Our system incorporates a knowledge-based query algebra that supports the interactive specification of dynamically evaluated queries, which enable neuroscientists to pose and answer domain-specific questions in an intuitive manner. Queries are built step by step in a visual query builder, building more complex queries from combinations of simpler queries. Our application is based on a scalable volume visualization framework that scales to multiple volumes of several teravoxels each, enabling the concurrent visualization and querying of the original EM volume, additional segmentation volumes, neuronal connectivity, and additional meta data comprising a variety of neuronal data attributes. We evaluate our application on a data set of roughly one terabyte of EM data and 750 GB of segmentation data, containing over 4,000 segmented structures and 1,000 synapses. We demonstrate typical use-case scenarios of our collaborators in neuroscience, where our system has enabled them to answer specific scientific questions using interactive querying and analysis on the full-size data for the first time.
More recently, we have presented ConnectomeExplorer REF , which supports fully dynamic visual queries, volume visualization of EM and segmentation data, as well as labeled meta-data such as synapse locations.
ConnectomeExplorer: Query-Guided Visual Analysis of Large Volumetric Neuroscience Data
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Medicine Computer Science