A VR ENHANCED COLLABORATIVE SYSTEM FOR 3D CONFOCAL MICROSCOPIC IMAGE PROCESSING AND VISUALIZATION

Abstract

With the rapid advancement in high-resolution confocal imaging, various forms of microscopy deliver substantial amount of valuable 3D cell biological information. Currently, image processing, modeling, visualization and analysis on confocal microscopic datasets are, however, still more or less following the traditional fashion that is 2D centric via a slice-by-slice strategy. Such image sequence based operations not only leads to lengthy processing times but also can potentially cause problems in data communication and interpretation, and knowledge discovery in a global 3D cellular level. In this paper, we describe our solution for processing, visualization and quantification of 3D confocal images with the CellStudio system we developed. CellStudio has a collaborative feature allowing 3D confocal data to be collected and retrieved across the net. CellStudio is also an integrated solution enabling 3D confocal image processing, volumetric visualization and interactive quantification performed in a network connected PC/Window platform.