There are many visualization systems available to the scientific community. Unfortunately the use of such systems is not as wide spread as we would like. The visualization of a scientists's data involves expertise from the scientist and the visualizing expert. In this paper we document the interaction between a scientist and a team of graphics people. We discuss why standard visualization systems were not used and we present our prototype system for fly-wing asymmetry visualization. In Biology organismal symmetry or lack thereof is being used as a measure of the quality of life forms. In this paper we present a system that was designed to facilitate the analysis of fly-wing data. The data used in this visualization was collected to test the hypothesis that old mothers produce lower quality offspring than young mothers. Thirteen landmarks at wing vein intersections were digitized three times on each wing and analyzed for asymmetry. The system that we present here complements the statistical analysis tools that are used for the formal analysis. In particular, our system has helped the scientist find outliers and gain an intuition for the data that has helped him decide which statistical analysis to perform.

Date Published: 14 May 1998
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 3298, Visual Data Exploration and Analysis V, (14 May 1998); doi: 10.1117/12.309546

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3298:
Visual Data Exploration and Analysis V
Robert F. Erbacher; Alex Pang, Editor(s)