Webcortex
Web interface to Cortical Surface Database
Many sites do not currently have access to cortical surfaces. Our goal
is to make our software publically available. In the interim, we
provide an html interface to one of its main parts to provide an
immediately available service to people who don't currently have access
to cortical surfaces but who may have large sets of imaging data in
standard 3-D coordinates.
One common request is to determine where on the folded, unfolded, or
flattened cortical surface (even somebody else's specific cortex) their
3-D point lies. Our initial demonstration service has can two several
things:
- Web user on a browser submits the 3-D Talairach coordinates of a
focus along with some rendering parameters (e.g., lateral or ventral
view, folded or unfolded surface), and gets back a bitmap of a painted
cortical surface showing the nearest cortical surface point to that 3-D
location.
- Web user clicks on a cortical surface point (perhaps after sending
a command to re-render the surface from a different point of view) and
is then returned the 3-D Talairach coordinates of that surface point.
It is also possible to generate and download (gray) VRML versions of
the surface for local rendering.
An initial version of this service
is available here (back online!).
The current demonstration server does not maintain state between queries,
so the turnaround time for each request is about 40 sec. However,
if you have a VRML viewer, you can download a point cloud or surface
that can be manipulated locally.
Here are 36 unfolded hemispheres from our current data base.
For implementational details, see Dale and Sereno (1993),
Sereno et al. (1995), Fischl et al. (1999), Dale et al. (1999).
Back to the sereno homepage
Back to the cogsci homepage