2013 IEEE Scientific Visualization Contest Winner: Observing Genomics and Phenotypical Patterns in the Developing Mouse Brain
The 2013 IEEE Scientific Visualization Contest focused on developmental neuroscience related to the mouse brain. In developmental neuroscience, researchers examine spatiotemporal patterns of gene expression to understand how brain structures evolve and vary over an organism's life. The Allen Developing Mouse Brain Atlas project generated expression data for thousands of genes with high spatial resolution over multiple developmental stages. These data have become an invaluable resource for neuroscientists and developmental biologists exploring interesting spatial and temporal patterns of gene expression. Given the extremely large amounts of data, it's desirable to apply visualization techniques to their access, analysis, and interpretation. The proposed visual-analytics system enables clear, insightful observations of the gene expression patterns for such data, focusing on structural patterns that vary across gene expression levels over six developmental stages. Users can explore patterns through specialized data-driven representations that capture emerging structure-function associations in the developing mouse brain. The system also provides an effective characterization of certain processes in the developing brain that could lead to further analysis.