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We introduce NeuroCave, a novel immersive visualization system that facilitates the visual inspection of structural and functional connectome datasets. The representation of the human connectome as a graph enables neuroscientists to apply network-theoretic approaches in order to explore its complex characteristics. With NeuroCave, brain researchers can interact with the connectome—either in a standard desktop environment or while wearing portable virtual reality headsets (such as Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear, or Google Daydream VR platforms)—in any coordinate system or topological space, as well as cluster brain regions into different modules on-demand. Furthermore, a default side-by-side layout enables simultaneous, synchronized manipulation in 3D, utilizing modern GPU hardware architecture, and facilitates comparison tasks across different subjects or diagnostic groups or longitudinally within the same subject. Visual clutter is mitigated using a state-of-the-art edge bundling technique and through an interactive layout strategy, while modular structure is optimally positioned in 3D exploiting mathematical properties of platonic solids. NeuroCave provides new functionality to support a range of analysis tasks not available in other visualization software platforms. NeuroCave is a web-based software application that facilitates the exploration of and comparison between connectome datasets in virtual reality environments. This article describes the visualization features provided by NeuroCave, enabling clinical neuroscientists to investigate connectome datasets in a flexible manner, to detect patterns within connectome data, and to generate hypotheses about these observations. NeuroCave is open source software freely available via our GitHub code repository at https://github.com/CreativeCodingLab/NeuroCave. |
