Micro-To-Macro Multimodality Atlas Formation

描述（由申请人提供）： 当多个尺度的解剖和功能细节可以在学科内部和学科之间联系起来时，医学和生物科学将实现量子飞跃。捕捉、管理和报告这些细节和联系的技术是地图集形成的科学。 虽然图像具有捕获微观和宏观细节的潜力，但地图集扩展了简单的图像表示，以包括不同尺度的数据之间的关系，并进一步补充了注释，Web内容和动画。地图集还提供信息的排序，以便消费者可以容易地理解地图集的内容。 我们建议开发软件应用程序，使有限的软件和图像处理专业知识的研究人员创建和交互式可视化多尺度，多模态，基于图像的地图集。这项工作建立在我们（北卡罗来纳州大学的CADDLab和Kitware，Inc.）有助于发展：NLM的Insight Toolkit（ITK）用于医学图像分析，可视化工具包（VTK）用于数据可视化。 为了证明我们的软件应用程序的功能，病理学家将应用它们将组织学的共聚焦显微镜图像与micro-CT和MR图像连接起来，以说明小鼠心肌基因表达模式与心脏肥大之间的关联。 第一阶段申请的具体目的如下： 1.提供经验证的软件方法，用于将多个共焦显微镜图像拼接和堆叠成标本的3D表示。 2.设计并演示一个可插入的软件框架，用于基于图像的图谱形成，支持组织学和体内图像的配准、分割、注释和链接任务。 3.扩展现有可视化产品以支持图谱查看：可视化大图像、管理注释和遍历指向外部内容的链接。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Quantum leaps in medicine and the biological sciences will be achieved when anatomical and functional details at multiple scales can be linked within and across subjects. The technology for capturing, managing, and reporting such details and linkages is the science of atlas formation. While images have the potential to capture micro and macro details, an atlas extends simple image representations to include relationships between data at different scales, further supplemented with annotations, web content, and animations. An atlas also provides an ordering to the information so that consumers can readily comprehend the atlas content. We propose to develop software applications that enable researchers with limited software and image processing expertise to create and interactively visualize multi-scale, multimodality, image-based atlases. This work builds upon industry-standard software libraries that we (the CADDLab at the University of North Carolina and Kitware, Inc.) were instrumental in developing: the NLM's Insight Toolkit (ITK) for medical image analysis and the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) for data visualization. To demonstrate the functionality of our software applications, pathologists will apply them to link confocal microscopy images of histology with micro-CT and MR images to illustrate the association between heart muscle gene expression patterns and cardiac hypertrophy in mice. The specific aims of this Phase I application are as follows: 1. To provide validated software methods for stitching and stacking multiple confocal microscopy images into a 3D representation of a specimen. 2. To design and demonstrate a pluggable software framework for image-based atlas formation supporting the tasks of registering, segmenting, annotating, and linking histological and in vivo images. 3. To extend an existing visualization product to support atlas viewing: visualizing large images, managing annotations, and traversing links to external content.