Biomedical data exploration meets telecollaboration

Abstract

In many biomedical applications, several researchers need to collaborate on extracting or validating models from empirical and simulation data. Often these collaborators do not reside at the same location, making collaboration and consultation difficult and costly. We present a system, TDE, which integrates sophisticated data exploration and telecollaboration capabilities. It runs in a heterogeneous distributed computing environment, supporting a wide variety of displays around a centralized compute server. It offers the users customizable views of the data. Pointing and cursor linking are based in n-dimensional object space, rather than screen space. We demonstrate TDE's telecollaborative data exploration facilities in three biomedical applications: user-assisted, boundary-based segmentation of an embryo heart, multi-spectral segmentation of thyroid tissue, and volume probing of a CT scan.