New 3D scanning campaign will reveal 20,000 animals in stunning detail

Cross, Ryan

doi:10.1126/science.aap7604

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…3D technology is playing an increasing role in education and archival efforts and is fundamentally expanding in application to incorporate widespread physical and digital distribution and machine learning to support feature analysis and comparisons (Hedrick et al 2020). This is exemplified by the recent NSF-funded Open Exploration of Vertebrate Diversity in 3D (oVert) program (van Hoose 2020), the goal of which is to produce state-of-the-art scans of more than 20,000 archived animal specimens from 16 museum and university collections across the US (Cross 2017). This resource will benefit comparative morphology research, among other applications.…”

Section: New Frontiers Education and Displaysmentioning

confidence: 99%

A tale of two whales: applying digital imaging and 3D printing to cetacean research and education

Mills

Semans²,

Flannery

et al. 2022

Frontiers in Ecol & Environ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Emerging technologies are changing how scientists and the public see and interact with cetacean specimens. As staff at a small, rural, marine science center, we employed LIDAR (light detection and ranging), x‐ray, computational tomography, and structured light scanning along with three‐dimensional (3D) printing to study and exhibit the remains of a 7.9‐m transient male killer whale (Orcinus orca) and a 22.4‐m female blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus). In collaboration with larger institutions, we applied these technologies to bone replication, skeletal articulation, soft‐tissue anatomical studies, and digital modeling to create high‐quality specimen replicas. These techniques surpass traditional modeling and restoration methods, and advance specimen‐associated research and documentation. In addition, 3D technology supports education and public awareness through in‐person and online exhibits and demonstrations. The decreasing cost and increasing appeal of advanced imaging can be used to enhance community engagement and the accessibility of science.

show abstract

Section: New Frontiers Education and Displaysmentioning

confidence: 99%

A tale of two whales: applying digital imaging and 3D printing to cetacean research and education

Mills

Semans²,

Flannery

et al. 2022

Frontiers in Ecol & Environ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In some cases, online specimen-based digital images or public data sets of specimen traits or measurements are available. Resources such as GenBank for gene sequences, MorphBank for measurements, IsoBank for isotopic data [ 13 ], and MorphoSource for computed tomography (CT) scans [ 14 ] are creating opportunities to aggregate and analyze specimen data across populations, taxa, and regions while reducing cost, effort, and delays.…”

Section: Recent Advancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The next generation of natural history collections

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The last 50 years have witnessed rapid changes in the ways that natural history specimens are collected, preserved, analyzed, and documented. Those changes have produced unprecedented access to specimens, images, and data as well as impressive research results in organismal biology. The stage is now set for a new generation of collecting, preserving, analyzing, and integrating biological samples—a generation devoted to interdisciplinary research into complex biological interactions and processes. Next-generation collections may be essential for breakthrough research on the spread of infectious diseases, feeding Earth's growing population, adapting to climate change, and other grand research challenges. A decade-long investment in research collection infrastructure will be needed.

show abstract

“…The availability of 3D imaging scanners has resulted in tens of thousands of large datasets to be analyzed. Our work is centered on the ScanAllFish and oVert projects, which are large-scale efforts to (CT) scan all the world's known species of fishes and other vertebrates [13,54]. The Micro-CT scan allows scientists to determine the skeletal structure of a variety of fishes, opening the doors to a better understanding of relationships among skeletal elements and the degree of skeletal mineralization, as well as enabling population-wide studies that were previously impossible.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unwind: Interactive Fish Straightening

Williams

Böck

Doraiswamy

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The ScanAllFish project is a large-scale effort to scan all the world's 33,100 known species of fishes. It has already generated thousands of volumetric CT scans of fish species which are available on open access platforms such as the Open Science Framework. To achieve a scanning rate required for a project of this magnitude, many specimens are grouped together into a single tube and scanned all at once. The resulting data contain many fish which are often bent and twisted to fit into the scanner. Our system, Unwind, is a novel interactive visualization and processing tool which extracts, unbends, and untwists volumetric images of fish with minimal user interaction. Our approach enables scientists to interactively unwarp these volumes to remove the undesired torque and bending using a piecewise-linear skeleton extracted by averaging isosurfaces of a harmonic function connecting the head and tail of each fish. The result is a volumetric dataset of a individual, straight fish in a canonical pose defined by the marine biologist expert user. We have developed Unwind in collaboration with a team of marine biologists: Our system has been deployed in their labs, and is presently being used for dataset construction, biomechanical analysis, and the generation of figures for scientific publication.

show abstract

New 3D scanning campaign will reveal 20,000 animals in stunning detail

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

A tale of two whales: applying digital imaging and 3D printing to cetacean research and education

A tale of two whales: applying digital imaging and 3D printing to cetacean research and education

The next generation of natural history collections

Unwind: Interactive Fish Straightening

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About