NeuroTerrain – a client-server system for browsing 3D biomedical image data sets

Here we describe the basic architecture of a client-server 3D visualization system, consisting of a thin Java client built on a development kit, and a computationally robust, high-performance server written in ANSI C++. The Java client components (NetOStat) support arbitrary-angle viewing and run on readily available desktop computers running Mac OS X, Windows XP, or Linux as a downloadable Java Application. Using the NeuroTerrain Software Development Kit (NT-SDK), sophisticated atlas browsing can be added to any Java-compatible application requiring as little as 50 lines of Java glue code, thus making it eminently re-useable and much more accessible to programmers building more complex, biomedical data analysis tools. The NT-SDK separates the interactive GUI components from the server control and monitoring, so as to support development of non-interactive applications. The server implementation takes full advantage of data center's high-performance hardware, where it can be co-localized with centrally-located, 3D dataset repositories, extending access to the researcher community throughout the Internet.The combination of an optimized server and modular, platform-independent client provides an ideal environment for viewing complex 3D biomedical datasets, taking full advantage of high-performance servers to prepare images and subsets of associated meta-data for viewing, as well as the graphical capabilities in Java to actually display the data.Volumetric anatomical atlases have become more prevalent as desktop computers have grown more powerful and have been provided with greater storage capacity. Digital atlases can be superior to print atlases in a number of ways: true 3D atlases are not restricted to just the limited number of sectional views typically presented in a print atlas but can be resliced in any arbitrary orientation [1]; the user can create spatially coded annotations or segmentation regions to share with other researchers [1]; they can be used as a can