Leveraging Web Technologies for Neuroimaging Research

Tarek Sherif

McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience

The Web was...

And then it was..

Then there as a bit of...

And now you have...

The Web is a Viable Platform

The Web is everywhere!

The Web is a Viable Platform

It's powerful

• Create full-featured applications

The Web is a Viable Platform

It's easy to use

• Everyone has a web browser
• No installation of software
• Always up to date

The Web is a Viable Platform

It's easy to create

          
  BrainBrowser.SurfaceViewer.start("brainbrowser", function(viewer) {
    viewer.render();

    viewer.loadColorMapFromURL("models/spectral.txt");
    viewer.loadModelFromURL("models/brain.obj", {
      format: "mniobj",
      complete: function() {
        viewer.loadIntensityDataFromURL("models/cortical-thickness.txt");
      }
    });

    viewer.autorotate.x = true;
    viewer.autorotate.y = true;

  });
        
      

Why do you care?

• Big, distributed data
  • Hard to move around
  • Create applications that access them remotely
• Sharing tools
  • Just need the URL
• Sharing data
  • Through tools that explore them in a meaningful way
• Collaboration

Case Study

The MACACC Dataset Viewer

• 6.3 million data maps
• 1TB of data
• Viewer created using BrainBrowser

What changed?

• JavaScript sucks less
• WebGL and HTML5 for high-perfomance graphics
• Web Workers for multithreading
• WebSocket and WebRTC for communication

JavaScript

• Much faster
  • Google made a big push with V8
  • Mozilla now pushing further with asm.js
• More robust
  • EcmaScript 5 and EcmaScript 6
  • Add features that facilitate development of complex applications
  • Deprecate unsafe features

HTML5 Canvas 2D

• High-performance, scriptable 2D drawing surface
• Pixel-level image processing

WebGL

• The browser talks directly to the graphics card
• High-performance 3D graphics

Web Workers

• JavaScript is single-threaded by design
• Web Workers allow for true multi-threading
• Compute-intensive tasks can be done in the browser without blocking UI or rendering

WebSocket and WebRTC

• WebSocket: full-duplex communication between browser and server
• WebRTC: direct communication between browsers
• Create collaborative web applications

Thanks!

tsherif@gmail.com

http://tareksherif.ca

@thsherif