Surgical Planning Laboratory Brain Browser

This applet is intended for teaching brain anatomy. Our goal was to develop an interactive program with 3D renderings that could run on machines without 3D graphics acceleration. The scenario that we had in mind for this applet is a classroom with a workstation style server and PC's/Mac's/WebPC's for the pupils. The viewer requires some imaging capabilities (such as needed for movies), but no 3D graphics capabilities. A fairly high network bandwidth (such as ISDN or better) is necessary.

Other tpyes of prerenderd images could be easily integrated into the the browser. For instance, we could combine regionalized sales figures with a map display and allow interactive determination of the amount of detail displayed. E. g. show sales figures by country or by state or by county.

The current implementation has been optimized for renderings with a resolution of 256x256. However, larger image sizes are possible. We have enclosed a larger sample data set to demonstrate this. However, the applet has not been fine tuned for the larger image sizes.

The renderings were pregenerated from a digital anatomical atlas of the brain. This information was combined with a parser of the hierarichal organization of brain structures. E.g. the frontal lobe is part of the neocortex which is part of the brain. Each structure has a color assigned to it. Hierarchies can be collapsed or expanded. Because of performance issues, recolorization has to be requested by clicking a button.

If you want to know the name of a structure, just click on it in the 3D window. If you want to know the location of a structure from the listing, click on the name and an anotation will appear in the 3d view.