In the News
NCMIR, BioWall Featured in The Scientist, San Diego Union-Tribune, and TechTarget
NCMIR's newly constructed BioWall tiled display, a 20-tile wall of flat-panel displays that project massive, detailed 2D and 3D images of the brain, has been featured in a variety of publications in recent months.
An article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, which recognized San Diego as the "world center for research in neuroscience," profiled several San Diego-based neuroscience research groups, including the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) The article pictured NCMIR Director and BIRN Coordinating Center Director Mark H. Ellisman before an image of a rat cerebellum projected onto the BioWall, NCMIR's newly designed 20-tile wall of high-resolution flat-panel displays that project massive, detailed 2D and 3D images of the brain. These large-scale images allow scientists to explore relationships among subcellular components, cells, and cellular networks at unprecedented resolution.
A recent TechTarget article also reported the BioWall as a high-tech solution for displaying massive datasets gathered from light and electron microscopes, "creating more realistic and easy-to-see depictions of biological structures."
Biologists typically view large datasets on a desktop monitor, which is like "looking through a straw into a haystack," said David Lee, NCMIR application engineer. But the BioWall broadens that scope. The display's high-resolution, flat-panel screens placed five across in four connecting rows project highly detailed images of the brain. As a result, researchers can achieve greater insight into relationships between cells and tissues.
The Scientist, which reported the growing use of Linux programming in laboratory settings, named the BioWall as an example of how large computer companies - in this case, Sun Microsystems - are taking part in the Linux trend. BIRN's Philip Papadopoulos said the BioWall's 20 monitors are driven by a cluster of dual-processor Sun Java Workstations that run on a Linux operating system. "Linux allows us a more complete control of the operating-system stack," Papadopoulos said.
