Brainacle: Interactive delineation and quantification of anatomical structures with virtual reality

Abstract

A virtual environment, equipped with suitable data representations, interaction techniques, and method interfaces, can facilitate effective human-in-the-loop analytics of 3D data. Motivated by this observation, we propose Brainacle, a native editor for the interactive delineation and quantification of anatomical structures in virtual reality. We validate this in a case study, where we process the gross brain regions of 20 individual animals from six different species of African cichlid fish from the tribe Lamprologinii, endemic to Lake Tanganyika in Africa. The software presented in this article can be used to quickly visualise and obtain an overview of imaged animal tissues, visually communicate features of interest, interactively add delineations, and perform different measurements in the same 3D environment. Brainacle is made available free of charge at https://brainacle.org and on the research data repository DaRUS.