Woolz IIP: A tiled on-the-fly sectioning server for 3D volumetric atlases

Abstract

We present a novel method to provide fast access to large 3D volumetric data sets from biological or medical imaging atlases. We extend the Internet Imaging Protocol with an open specification for requesting tiled sections of 3D objects. We evaluate the performance of the protocol and demonstrate it with a platform independent web viewer that allows on-the-fly browsing of section views of multi-gigabyte 3D objects. The method uses Woolz, an efficient image processing library, to provide very fast access to section views of the volumetric data. The server has been implemented to run on standard Linux systems and it avoids the requirement for high-performance parallel processing or expensive software. We have tested the system on data volumes up to 13.4 GB and demonstrated no loss of responsiveness for the user. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.