Visualizing Brain Connectivity with ETS

We’re always excited to hear about new ways that the open source Enthought Tool Suite is being put to use. Our friend Stephan Gerhard and his colleague Patric Hagmannat the Ecole Polytechnique Federale deLausanne, Switzerland just recently won a prize for the very cool visualizations produced by their ConnectomeViewer application.

Diffusion Spectrum Imaging data has been processed by the Connectome Mapping Pipeline, bundling white matter tracts and producing networks in multiple resolutions (number of nodes) and different edge attributes. The image was rendered using the ConnectomeViewer application. This network has 258 nodes corresponding to cortical and subcortical ROIs (shown as blue cubes and as transparent surfaces), the edges depict threshold and color-coded densities between connecting ROIs. Green cubes are picked for further processing with the integrated Python interface.

As to the specific role of ETS, the ConnectomeViewer application’s framework was built using Enthought Envisage, with Mayavi2 using TVTK as plugin. Additionally, TVTK wrapsVTK to trait-enable Python. Nifti, Gifti, Connectome File Format (CFF) were also employed.

Congratulations Stephan & Patric!