Brain Browser: distributed, web-based neurological data visualization

Recent years have seen massive, distributed datasets become the norm in neuroimaging research, and the methodologies used to analyze them have, in response, become more collaborative and exploratory. Tools and infrastructure are continuously being developed and deployed to facilitate research in this context: grid computation platforms to process the data, distributed data stores to house and share them, high-speed networks to move them around and collaborative, often web-based, platforms to provide access to and sometimes manage the entire system. Brain Browser is a lightweight, high-performance Java Script visualization library built to provide easy-to-use, powerful, on-demand visualization of remote datasets in this new research environment. Brain Browser leverages modern web technologies, such as WebGL, HTML5 and Web Workers, to visualize 3D surface and volumetric neuroimaging data in any modern web browser without requiring any browser plugins. It is thus trivial to integrate Brain Browser into any web-based platform. Brain Browser is simple enough to produce a basic web-based visualization in a few lines of code, while at the same time being robust enough to create full-featured visualization applications. Brain Browser can dynamically load the data required for a given visualization, so no network bandwidth needs to be waisted on data that will not be used. Brain Browser's integration into the standardized web platform also allows users to consider using 3D data visualization in novel ways, such as for data distribution, data sharing and dynamic online publications. Brain Browser is already being used in two major online platforms, CBRAIN and LORIS, and has been used to make the 1TB MACACC dataset openly accessible.