The Sun Center of Excellence for Visual Genomics has been working towards using visual data exploration as a means to shed light on the causes of genetics disease.

Recently they developed 4D visualization virtual real atlas of the human body and other organism, with time being the fourth dimension. The technology behind is the world’s first Java 3DTM-enabled CAVE® (CAVE Automated Virtual Environment – developed at the COE as a visualization tool for Bioinformatics research and development).

4D enables you to virtually view the changes occurring in diseased state or genetically affected individuals and can be used for surgical studies.

The CAVE

Christoph with a part of the human body, picture by Christoph W. Sensen (via)

The fully immersive virtual environment consisting of full projection walls, which is CAVE automated, enables scientists to walk in through the three-dimensional virtual real models of biological systems, including cells, tissues and entire organisms. Read more about CAVE and the technical specifications here.

You can try some of the demos available there like the 4D human heart, Negative 3D reconstruction of vascular canals in human cortical bone from micro-CT scans, Human Skeleton etc..

Hmm…finally completed this long pending post discovered via Microarray Blog.