Fig. 3

Interactive selection possibilities complement the automatic feature-based group selections.

Tracking data from cranial neural crest cells of a zebrafish embryo during 14-20 hpf are shown. (A) All visualization windows allow selecting groups of interest using freehand selection tools. From the left: maximum intensity projection overlay of the raw images and cell centroids for two time points of the neural crest data set at 12.5 hpf and 14 hpf (A1, A2); tracks of all cells in 3D (A3); subset of selected tracks in 3D (A4); scatter plot of track-based features (A5). All visualization windows (A1-A5) are synchronized to obtain consistent selections in all views (see corresponding color-code of panels A1-A5). (B) Exemplary manual selection of a group of interest. Freehand selection tools allow intuitive and interactive selection/deselection of groups of interest. (C) All performed selection steps can be recorded in a hierarchical selection tree view and arbitrary nodes of the tree can be combined to new groups of interest. The hierarchical selection tree view serves as a template to reproduce a particular selection on other data sets including the possibility of refinements to adapt to biological variation of different data sets. The panels show neural crest cells of a zebrafish embryo (12.5 − 28 hpf). Scale bar: 100 μm.