PhenoDCC Image Viewer

The PhenoDCC image viewer allows biologists to observe phenotypic variation between mutants and wildtypes as a result of genetic mutations. It supports side-by-side comparison of images that belong to mutants and wildtypes (for instance, the variation in skeletal structure as made visible through X-ray images).

Implementation guidelines

The viewer has three main components:

• Processing The image data submitted to the PhenoDCC comes in various formats. These are BMP, DICOM, JPEG, PNG and TIFF. Since the image viewer must display all of these images on the browser, we pre-process them to JPEG formats. This allows us to also compress the files for efficient dissemination. Furthermore, since the images are likely to be high-resolution biological images, we decompose the images into image tiles. See processing/README.md for further details.

• Image Viewer This is a web application that provides the interface for viewing the image tiles, and to control them. It consist of relevant web services for retrieving image meta-data and an embeddable Javascript client. See viewer/README.md for further details.

• Image database This is the database that links the image tiles to the data contexts. The web services provide an interface for accessing this database, which provides the mechanisms for retrieving image tiles. See processing/phenodcc_media.sql for further details.