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J. Bauer:
"Integration of Web-Based Information Visualizations into a Scientific Visualization Environment";
Supervisor: E. Gröller, K. Bühler; Institut für Computergraphik und Algorithmen, 2014.

Today´s neuro-biological research is often based on brains of the Drosophila Melanogaster, the commonly known fruit fly. To study the function of neuronal circuits scientists often have to compare the neuronal structures of a set of different brains. Their aim is to find out how complex behavior is generated. Therefore the scientists at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna are using a confocal microscope to produce volumetric images of Drosophila brains. Today they have acquired more than 40.000 images and a large amount of additional data.

In many cases 3D renderings of these volumetric images are not sufficient to solve certain scientific problems especially when multiple brains have to be considered. Therefore the researchers rely on additional data which is stored in databases. The problem here is that the scientists have two different data sources without a connection between them. On the one hand there are the volumetric images and on the other hand there is the additional data which has certain relations to the brains.

This thesis proposes a software design concept to establish a connection between 3D renderings of volumetric images and additional data by using information visualizations. Highlighting techniques can be introduced to link volume visualizations of the brains to related data visualized by 2D information visualizations. Therefore the implementation of this design concept gets integrated into an existing scientific visualization environment. To evaluate this concept common neuro-biological use cases are introduced and it is described how the implementation of this design concept supports the work flow of the researchers.

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_234800.pdf