FluoRender: joint freehand segmentation and visualization for many-channel fluorescence data analysis

BMC Bioinformatics

Table 2 A comparison of multichannel processing and visualization features in popular tools

	Amira	Imaris	Vaa3D	Volocity	FluoRender
Open Source (Free)	No	No	Yes	No	Yes
Channel Number (Tested)	RGBA	25	RGBA	16^a	96^b
Time to Load Data^c	20 min	5 min (For 25 channels)	2 min (w/ Renaming)/10 min	1 min	1 min
Channel Adjustment	Not interactive	Interactive	Not Interactive	Not always interactive	Interactive
Channel Intermixing	Depth	Depth	Depth	Depth	Multiple
Floating-point/Tone Mapping	No	No	No	No	Yes
Volume Selection/Extraction	No	No	No	No	Yes

^aVolocity may have corrupted rendering results depending on the number of channels
^bThe test data set contains 96 channels. More can be supported by design
^cTime for an experienced user when manual work is required. An ordinary hard drive disk was used (4 TB/7200 RPM). Imaris was not able to load more than 25 channels. Therefore, the loading time was measured for 25 channels

ISSN: 1471-2105