3Dscript.server: true server-side 3D animation of microscopy images using a natural language-based syntax

Bioinformatics. 2021 Dec 11;37(24):4901-4902. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btab462.

Abstract

Summary: Creating 3D animations from microscopy data is computationally expensive and requires high-end hardware. We therefore developed 3Dscript.server, a 3D animation software that runs as a service on dedicated, shared workstations. Using 3Dscript as the underlying rendering engine, it offers unique features not found in existing software: rendering is performed completely server-side. The target animation is specified on the client without the rendering engine, eliminating any hardware requirements client-side. Still, defining an animation is intuitive due to 3Dscript's natural language-based animation description. We implemented a new OMERO web app to utilize 3Dscript.server directly from the OMERO web interface; a Fiji client to use 3Dscript.server from Fiji for integration into image processing pipelines; and batch scripts to run 3Dscript.server on compute clusters for large-scale visualization projects.

Availability and implementation: Source code and documentation is available at https://github.com/bene51/omero_3Dscript, https://github.com/bene51/3Dscript.server and https://github.com/bene51/3Dscript.cluster.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Computers*
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Language
  • Microscopy*
  • Software