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