The object lineage view is designed to inspect temporal evolution of objects of interests, for example, stem cell colonies. In the cell biology data sets, cell colonies can only merge and hence their lineage information forms a tree structure over time. The lineage view contains a set of connected nodes with colony identifications (ID) and nodes placed at the time when a colony ID was created. A new colony ID is created for each colony in the first frame and for a merged colony. An example lineage view is shown in Figure 1.
A screen capture of lineage view
Interactive Functionality
By clicking on each node, a user can obtain additional information about the birth and death time frames of a colony from a pop-up dialog as illustrated in Figure 2. The pop-up dialog also allows a user to switch from the lineage view to image or database views using hyperlinks.
A screen capture of colony specific information. The dialog with this information is invoked by clicking on a tree node in the lineage view
Lineage view: parameter selection
The lineage view has two parameters that can be changed in the two
edit box on the left side of the lineage view (see Figure 1).
Replicate Selection
A user can select one of the three replicates.
Colony
A user can enter a single colony ID.
Depth
A user can enter how many levels of the tree from the
selected colony ID node should be displayed.
Figure 2 illustrates the case of depth equal to one and two.
If the symbol “*” is entered then all levels are shown.
Update Lineage
Updating lineage by clicking on the "Submit" button
Additional options
A user can change the magnification of a lineage view by
using the scroll wheel on a computer mouse.
A screen capture of a lineage view for the depth setting
equal to one (left) and two (right)
