Zoomable Cell

Applicant:

Professor Dr. Stefan Gumhold, Dresden
Technische Universität Dresden
Institut für Software- und Multimediatechnik
Lehrstuhl für Computergraphik und Visualisierung (LCGV)

Professor Dr. Michael Schröder, Dresden
Technische Universität Dresden
Biotechnologisches Zentrum (Biotec)

Project:

Zoomable Cell (Publications)

Summary:

The zoomable cell will integrate ten thousands of protein structures and complexes with ten thousands of microscopy images in an interactive, high quality, 3D visualization of a cell. The zoomable cell will allow life scientists for the first time ever to seamlessly navigate from views of a whole cell of 10.000 nm size to detailed views of individual amino acids and atoms at sub nano-meter scale. The core of the zoomable cell is a natural coordinate system that links spatial regions
IMG!!
Figure 1: The zoomable cell: A. Whole cell (10.000 nm) B. A nucleus with nuclear pores (1000 nm) C. A patch of nuclear pores (100+ nm) D. A single nuclear pore (100 nm) E. A high resolution model of a nuclear pores (100 nm) F. A single protein (10 nm) G. Several amino acids (1 nm)

of a 3D reference model of an abstract cell to an ontology specifying the cell structure semantically. Microscopy images and protein structures are integrated into the zoomable cell by assigning ontology information to different regions in the datasets. The realization of the zoomable cell brings up several challenging research problems that are of interest independent of this specific application. Firstly, we will examine strategies for exploiting semantic information to improve techniques for non rigid registration and to make the adjustment of hardly comprehensible visualization parameters as well as the navigation in complex 3D scenes more intuitive. Secondly, we provide solutions for joint high-quality visualization of images, volumes and a variety of surface representations. Last but not least we develop visualization strategies for huge heterogeneous scenes with support for smooth traversal across 5 orders of magnitude with real-time performance. The zoomable cell will be available on a desktop and in different virtual reality environments such as caves or powerwalls with support for a life science community, which will use the zoomable cell to share microscopy images, protein structures, and other data in a novel platform, whose impact is comparable to google earth.

Presentations: