BigDataViewer: Interactive Visualization and Image Processing for Terabyte Data Sets

TL;DR

BigDataViewer is an open source Fiji plugin that enables interactive visualization and virtual re-slicing of extremely large 3D microscopy datasets, overcoming previous frame rate limitations for real-time analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a new tool that allows seamless, high-performance interactive visualization of terabyte-scale image data from local or remote sources.

Findings

Achieves real-time interactive navigation of large datasets

Supports visualization of both local and remote data sources

Enables virtual re-slicing of large volumetric images

Abstract

The increasingly popular light sheet microscopy techniques generate very large 3D time-lapse recordings of living biological specimen. The necessity to make large volumetric datasets available for interactive visualization and analysis has been widely recognized. However, existing solutions build on dedicated servers to generate virtual slices that are transferred to the client applications, practically leading to insufficient frame rates (less than 10 frames per second) for truly interactive experience. An easily accessible open source solution for interactive arbitrary virtual re-slicing of very large volumes and time series of volumes has yet been missing. We fill this gap with BigDataViewer, a Fiji plugin to interactively navigate and visualize large image sequences from both local and remote data sources.