Visualization of image data from cells to organisms

Walter, T. Shattuck, DW. Baldock, R. Bastin, ME. Carpenter, AE. Duce, S. Ellenberg, J. Fraser, A. Hamilton, N. Pieper, S. Ragan, MA. Schneider, JE. Tomancak, P. Heriche, JK. (2010) Visualization of image data from cells to organisms. Nature Methods 7(3)

Lots of data is a problem, need tools to visualize it all, put it all together etc. There are many technical challenges -- file formats, meta-data, etc.

You can use color coding to represent higher-dimensional data, but that only gets you to 5-6 dimensions. Some people have considered converting data to sounds "to take advantage of people's ability to distinguish subtle variations in sounds patterns." (‘data sonification’ (T. Hermann,T. Nattkemper, H. Ritter and W. Schubert. Proc. Mathematical and Engineering Techniques in Medical and Biological Sciences, 745–75))

DTI - several ways of visualizing the tensor directions, gives you 3D data set where each voxel is essentially a 3D value (the colors actualy can work here.)

Registration: simplest form is designate one acquisition as the reference and registering all others to it, but introduces a reference-specific bias. Atlas registration registers to an idealized expert-definied atlas. Something like SIFT might be useful. And here's a paper about gene expression atlases.

I got a bunch of other registration papers, and visualization tool papers from this review to look over.