The Virtual Pediatric Airways Workbench.

The Virtual Pediatric Airways Workbench (VPAW) is a patient-centered surgical planning software system targeted to pediatric patients with airway obstruction. VPAW provides an intuitive surgical planning interface for clinicians and supports quantitative analysis regarding prospective surgeries to aid clinicians deciding on potential surgical intervention. VPAW enables a full surgical planning pipeline, including importing DICOM images, segmenting the airway, interactive 3D editing of airway geometries to express potential surgical treatment planning options, and creating input files for offline geometric analysis and computational fluid dynamics simulations for evaluation of surgical outcomes.

Quantitative assessment of the upper airway in infants and children with subglottic stenosis.

Objectives/hypothesis: Determine whether quantitative geometric measures and a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) model derived from medical imaging of children with subglottic stenosis (SGS) can be effective diagnostic and treatment planning tools.

Study Design: Retrospective chart and imaging review in a tertiary care hospital.

Methods: Computed tomography scans (n = 17) of children with SGS were analyzed by geometric and CFD methods.

The spatial segregation of pericentric cohesin and condensin in the mitotic spindle.

In mitosis, the pericentromere is organized into a spring composed of cohesin, condensin, and a rosette of intramolecular chromatin loops. Cohesin and condensin are enriched in the pericentromere, with spatially distinct patterns of localization. Using model convolution of computer simulations, we deduce the mechanistic consequences of their spatial segregation.

A 3D map of the yeast kinetochore reveals the presence of core and accessory centromere-specific histone.

The budding yeast kinetochore is ~68 nm in length with a diameter slightly larger than a 25 nm microtubule. The kinetochores from the 16 chromosomes are organized in a stereotypic cluster encircling central spindle microtubules. Quantitative analysis of the inner kinetochore cluster (Cse4, COMA) reveals structural features not apparent in singly attached kinetochores.

Pericentric chromatin loops function as a nonlinear spring in mitotic force balance.

The mechanisms by which sister chromatids maintain biorientation on the metaphase spindle are critical to the fidelity of chromosome segregation. Active force interplay exists between predominantly extensional microtubule-based spindle forces and restoring forces from chromatin. These forces regulate tension at the kinetochore that silences the spindle assembly checkpoint to ensure faithful chromosome segregation.

Adapting the ITK Registration Framework to Fit Parametric Image Models.

The image registration framework in the Insight Tookit offers a powerful body of code for finding the optimal spatial transform that registers one image with another. However, ITK currently lacks a way to fit parametric models of image pixel values to an input image. Such a capability is necessary in certain applications such as sub-resolution localization of molecules in fluorescence microscopy.

FluoroSim: A Visual Problem-Solving Environment for Fluorescence Microscopy.

Fluorescence microscopy provides a powerful method for localization of structures in biological specimens. However, aspects of the image formation process such as noise and blur from the microscope's point-spread function combine to produce an unintuitive image transformation on the true structure of the fluorescing molecules in the specimen, hindering qualitative and quantitative analysis of even simple structures in unprocessed images. We introduce FluoroSim, an interactive fluorescence microscope simulator that can be used to train scientists who use fluorescence microscopy to understand the artifacts that arise from the image formation process, to determine the appropriateness of fluorescence microscopy as an imaging modality in an experiment, and to test and refine hypotheses of model specimens by comparing the output of the simulator to experimental data.

Interactive visualization of intercluster galaxy structures in the horologium-reticulum supercluster.

We present GyVe, an interactive visualization tool for understanding structure in sparse three-dimensional (3D) point data. The scientific goal driving the tool's development is to determine the presence of filaments and voids as defined by inferred 3D galaxy positions within the Horologium-Reticulum supercluster (HRS). GyVe provides visualization techniques tailored to examine structures defined by the intercluster galaxies.