Crab Eye Computer Tomography Image Cubes

With the continued development of diverse forms of computer tomography (CT), 3D imaging is becoming more and more common. There are a large variety of 3D viewers available, but analysis programs are heavily geared towards medical diagnostics/imaging. As 3D imaging becomes cheaper and more readily available, there will be an increasing demand for flexible image analysis tools that can be used to interpret diverse, non- medical images to enable users to extract nonstandard data. Tools with the flexibility, and user-friendliness, of software such as ImageJ are required.

We are interested in understanding the compound eyes of arthropod animals such as crabs and insects and are using CT as one of our approaches. Unlike our eyes, compound eyes have many hundreds of tiny lenses, with each light-receptive unit of the eye pointing in different directions to provide a very wide field of view for the animal. In an attempt to find a new way to reconstruct the visual field of arthropod eyes, we have recently produced a micro-CT scan (499 x 488 x 930 pixels) of a crab eye. We now need to reconstruct the direction in space of each light receptor cell within the. This requires us to mark each receptor with two 3D points in order to work out its longitudinal, axial, direction. An efficient software tool is needed for data extraction and storage, ideally as a module/extension package for one of the freely available 3D viewer software packages. A follow up project could provide software to reconstruct an eye's field of view, mapping the 3D directions of each light receptor onto a sphere representing the space around an animal. Such software would have a major impact in visual ecology.

Client

Contact Persons: Dr. Jan Hemmi; A/Prof Julian Partridge
Telephone: 0403660221
Email:[email protected]
Preferred method of contact: email
Location: Zoology building room 1.08 Crawley

IP Exploitation Model

The client wishes to use a Creative Commons CC BY-NC model to deal with IP embodied in the project.