January came and went fairly quickly and I've spent most of the month in the lab working on some stuff for the University of Manchester. This was an HPC effort using CCS to run parallelised computations on Functional MRI scans.

Again, the general architecture we used was to make use of WF as a controlling layer for the experimental process, with SQL and CCS acting as data and computing service gateways respectively. As we're free to choose any technology for the UI (previously we've used Winforms and SharePoint (MOSS 2007)) this time around we used WPF as the focus for the end results was on the visualisation of the output: connection points on the brain.

We didn't have the time to create full surface and volume meshes of the brain, so instead we used a series of slices and placed these on 3 separate planes in 3D space. We then changed the material as the planes moved allowing navigation throughout the brain volume. The actual connection points and paths were then plotted as 3D objects in this space. You can see how it looks below:

So as the sliders moved, the user can approximate the position through the use of the the position of the planes and the rendering of the relevant surface images. Well done WPF!