Volume rendering

VTK is an open-source software system for image processing, 3D graphics, volume rendering and visualization. VTK includes many advanced algorithms (e.g., surface reconstruction, implicit modeling, decimation) and rendering techniques (e.g., hardware-accelerated volume rendering, LOD control).

VTK is used by academicians for teaching and research; by government research institutions such as Los Alamos National Lab in the US or CINECA in Italy; and by many commercial firms who use VTK to build or extend products.

The origin of VTK is with the textbook "The Visualization Toolkit, an Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics" originally published by Prentice Hall and now published by Kitware, Inc. (Third Edition ISBN 1-930934-07-6). VTK has grown (since its initial release in 1994) to a world-wide user base in the commercial, academic, and research communities.

webKnossos is an open-source data sharing and annotation platform for tera-scale 2D and 3D image datasets.

The core features of webKnossos are:

• fast 3D data streaming
• share links to specific locations in the data
• uniquely fast skeleton annotation (flight mode) and
• efficient volume annotation
• mesh rendering
• collaboration and sharing tools

webKnossos facilitates image analysis workflows on multi-terabyte datasets, including visualization of raw and multi-modal microscopy data, distributed training data generation and proof-reading of automatic segmentation.

As a scientific resource, webknossos.org serves as a database for published image datasets including their annotations.

Summary

napari is a fast, interactive, multi-dimensional image viewer for Python. It’s designed for browsing, annotating, and analyzing large multi-dimensional images. It’s built on top of Qt (for the GUI), vispy (for performant GPU-based rendering), and the scientific Python stack (e.g. numpy, scipy). It includes critical viewer features out-of-the-box, such as support for large multi-dimensional data, and layering and annotation. By integrating closely with the Python ecosystem, napari can be easily coupled to leading machine learning and image analysis tools (e.g. scikit-image, scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch), enabling more user-friendly automated analysis.

Installation

• The installation procedure for Silicon Mac (M1 Processor, arm64 ) requires some tricks. As of Oct 2021, this procedure by Peter Sobolewski works but:
  • For installing pyqt5, use a slightly different command `brew install PyQt@5` to install PyQt5.  

Dragonfly is a software platform for the intuitive inspection of multi-scale multi-modality image data. Its user-friendly experience translates into powerful quantitative findings with high-impact visuals, driven by nuanced easy-to-learn controls.

For segmentation: It provides an engine fior machine Learning, Watershed and superpixel methods, support histological data .

It offers a 3D viewer, and python scripting capacities .

It is free for reserach use, but not for commercial usage.

CLIJ2 is a GPU-accelerated image processing library for ImageJ/Fiji, Icy, Matlab and Java. It comes with hundreds of operations for filtering, binarizing, labeling, measuring in images, projections, transformations and mathematical operations for images. While most of these are classical image processing operations, CLIJ2 also allows performing operations on matrices potentially representing neighborhood relationships between cells and pixels.

CLIJ2 was developed to process images from fluorescence microscopy data of developing cells, tissues, organoids and organisms.

FluoRender is an interactive rendering tool for confocal microscopy data visualization. It combines the rendering of multi-channel volume data and polygon mesh data, where the properties of each dataset can be adjusted independently and quickly. The tool is designed especially for neurobiologists, allowing them to better visualize confocal data from fluorescently-stained brains, but it is also useful for other biological samples.

3Dscript is a plugin for Fiji/ImageJ for creating 3D and 4D animations of microscope data. In contrast to existing 3D visualization packages, animations are not keyframe-based, but are described by a natural language-based syntax.

Paintera is a general visualization tool for 3D volumetric data and proof-reading in segmentation/reconstruction with a primary focus on neuron reconstruction from electron micrographs in connectomics. It features/supports:

•  Views of orthogonal 2D cross-sections of the data at arbitrary angles and zoom levels
•  Mipmaps for efficient display of arbitrarily large data at arbitrary scale levels
•  Label data
  •  Painting
  •  Manual agglomeration
  •  3D visualization as polygon meshes
    •  Meshes for each mipmap level
    •  Mesh generation on-the-fly via marching cubes to incorporate painted labels and agglomerations in 3D visualization. Marching Cubes is parallelized over small blocks. Only relevant blocks are considered (huge speed-up for sparse label data).

Paintera is implemented in Java and makes extensive use of the UI framework JavaFX

ParaView is an open-source, multi-platform data analysis and visualization application. ParaView users can quickly build visualizations to analyze their data using qualitative and quantitative techniques. The data exploration can be done interactively in 3D or programmatically using ParaView’s batch processing capabilities.

ParaView was developed to analyze extremely large datasets using distributed memory computing resources. It can be run on supercomputers to analyze datasets of petascale size as well as on laptops for smaller data, has become an integral tool in many national laboratories, universities and industry, and has won several awards related to high performance computation.

Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.

NeuroMorph is a toolset designed to import, analyze, and visualize mesh models in Blender. It has been developed specifically for the morphological analysis of 3D objects derived from serial electron microscopy images of brain tissue, but much of its functionality can be applied to any 3D mesh. These mesh objects can be generated by any 3D image segmentation software, such as ilastik or Fiji. 

Drishti (from Sanskrit  word for "vision" or "insight") is a multi-platform, open-source volume-exploration and presentation tool. Written for visualizing tomography data, electron-microscopy data and the like.

vmtk is a collection of libraries and tools for 3D reconstruction, geometric analysis, mesh generation and surface data analysis for image-based modeling of blood vessels.

vmtk is composed of

• C++ classes (VTK and ITK -based algorithms)
• Python classes (high-level functionality - each class is a script)
• PypeS - Python pipeable scripts, a framework which enables vmtk scripts to interact with each other

ClearVolume is a real-time live 3D visualization library designed for high-end volumetric microscopes such as SPIM and DLSM microscopes. With ClearVolume you can see live on your screen the stacks acquired by your microscope instead of waiting for offline post-processing to give you an intuitive and comprehensive view on your data. The biologists can immediately decide whether a sample is worth imaging. ClearVolume can easily be integrated into existing Java, C/C++, Python, or LabVIEW based microscope software. It has a dedicated interface to MicroManager/OpenSpim/OpenSpin control software. ClearVolume supports multi-channels, live 3D data streaming from remote microscopes, and uses a multi-pass Fibonacci rendering algorithm that can handle large volumes. Moreover, ClearVolume is integrated into the Fiji/ImageJ2/KNIME ecosystem. You can now open your stacks with ClearVolume from within these popular frameworks for offline viewing.

The Huygens Software Suite consists of different image processing packages with functionalities that include deconvolution, interactive analysis, and volume visualization of 2D-3D multi-channel and time series images from fluorescence microscopes such as widefield, confocal, multi-photon, spinning disk, Array Detector, STED, and Light Sheet

The 3D Rotation plug-in allows you to record a 360 degree rotation of the current focused 3D VTK viewer about the vertical screen axis.

The 'angle step' parameter indicates the deviation in degrees between two consecutive snapshots. Increasing the angle will increase rotation speed (up to a point where it might look like jumping more than rotating) and reduce the final movie length.