Abstract
We present DatAR, an Augmented Reality prototype designed to support neuroscientists in finding fruitful directions to explore in their own research. DatAR provides an immersive analytics environment for exploring relations between topics published in the neuroscience literature. Neuroscientists need to analyse large numbers of publications in order to understand whether a potential experiment is likely to yield a valuable contribution. Using a user-centred design approach, we have identified useful tasks in collaboration with neuroscientists and implemented corresponding functionalities in DatAR. This facilitates querying and visualising relations between topics. Participating neuroscientists have stated that the DatAR prototype assists them in exploring and visualising seldom-mentioned direct relations and also indirect relations between brain regions and brain diseases. We present the latest incarnation of DatAR and illustrate the use of the prototype to carry out two realistic tasks to identify fruitful experiments.
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Notes
- 1.
Dr Cunqing Huangfu, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
- 2.
Dr Yu Mu, Danyang Li, and Yu Qian are neuroscientists at Institute of Neuroscience of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
- 3.
Neuroscience publications in PubMed https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ as of February 3, 2022.
- 4.
See also the video https://drive.google.com/file/d/12sMvClw1zcytNPk7zl3J5NTeg22dsm2b/view.
- 5.
- 6.
Knowledge Graphs of Brain Science in Triply
https://krr.triply.cc/BrainScienceKG/-/queries/Brain-Region---Brain-Disease/1.
- 7.
414,224 neuroscience publications in PubMed https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ as of February 3, 2022.
- 8.
Unity https://unity.com/.
- 9.
Microsoft Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/mrtk-unity/.
- 10.
Microsoft HoloLens 2 is an Augmented Reality headset developed and manufactured by Microsoft, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Zhisheng Huang at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, for creating the repository of co-occurrences between topics in Knowledge Graphs of Brain Science and Triply (Triply https://triply.cc/) for hosting these. We would like to thank Ivar Troost for implementing the Co-occurrences Widget in the DatAR prototype. We are grateful to our colleagues in the DatAR, Visualisation and Graphics (Utrecht University) and Human-Centred Data Analytics (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica) groups for their support. This work is supported by a scholarship from the China Scholarship Council (CSC): No. 202108440064.
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Xu, B., Tanhaei, G., Hardman, L., Hürst, W. (2024). DatAR: Supporting Neuroscience Literature Exploration by Finding Relations Between Topics in Augmented Reality. In: Rudinac, S., et al. MultiMedia Modeling. MMM 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14557. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53302-0_24
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