Open Chrono-Morph Viewer: visualize big bioimage time series containing heterogeneous volumes.

SUMMARY

Time-lapse 3D imaging is fundamental for studying biological processes but requires software able to handle terabytes of voxel data. Although many multidimensional viewing applications exist, they mostly lack support for heterogeneous voxel counts, datatypes, and modalities in a single timeline. Open Chrono-Morph Viewer provides a straightforward graphical user interface to quickly investigate multi-timescale datasets represented as separate volume files in the common NRRD format for compatibility between toolchains. It features dynamic clipping surfaces for rapid investigation of 3D morphology and a scriptable animation API for quantitative, repeatable, publication-quality visualization. It is implemented in pure Python using common libraries to facilitate community-driven development.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION

OCMV is available at https://github.com/ShangWangLab/OpenChronoMorphViewer for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Supporting tutorials, documentation, and installation instructions can be found in the supplementary information. Our modified Fiji I/O plugin for up to 5D NRRD file conversion is available at https://github.com/afaubert/IO.