The Human Genetics Unit (Medical Research Council, UK) in collaboration with the Jackson Laboratory, Edinburgh University Department of Anatomy and a number of sites in Europe and the US are developing a full 3D anatomical atlas of mouse development and an associated database of gene-expression patterns, cell-lineage and other spatially-organized data.
A screen shot stereo-pair illustration of interactive real-time control, embedded within a WWW document, of a 3-dimensional volume rendered reconstruction of human embryonic anatomy, showing a 7-week old human embryo found in the Carnegie Collection as 1997 serial cross sections. The actual volume rendering computations were performed in real time by a "farm" of powerful geographically-distributed "visualization server" computers, whose output was mapped into the HTML page by use of a standard API (now called CCI++(TM)) for embedding, or "inlining," interactive application objects in WWW documents, accessed through our enhanced version of NCSA's Mosaic WWW browser. The stereo pair was created by "cloning" the Mosaic window and then interactively rotating the embryo to the right in the cloned window, using the control panel seen to the right of the Mosaic windows.
This technology was developed by Michael Doyle, David Martin and Cheong Ang in San Francisco, California and was demonstrated there in November, 1993.
An MPEG movie (283K) of the VIS Weblet is available for viewing. A Quicktime movie demo can also be viewed or downloaded by clicking here (warning: approx. 18 MBytes). This technology will be available for licensing soon. For more information click here.
