Download Reconstruct User Manual

Chapter 2: Software History
History
The origins of RECONSTRUCTTM began in 1995 with the development of a Windows 3.1
program for tracing serial sections. WinV8 was developed in the Image Graphics
Laboratory (Kristen Harris, Director) at Children's Hospital, Boston, as a continuation of
the DOS-based V8 program developed by John Davis.
Quickly WinV8 was replaced by a new Win32 application, IGL Trace. Version 1.0a of IGL
Trace was completed in August of 1997, with NIH funding to the Mental Retardation
Research Center at Children's Hospital. IGL Trace proved useful for identifying, tracing,
measuring, and reconstructing 3D objects in serial sections in a number of scientific
studies (Fiala, 2005; http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgibin/fulltext/118735636/PDFSTART).
IGL Trace was designed to operate on aligned sections. These can be images obtained
from electron or light microscopy. For electron microscopy, where each section is imaged
separately, it is necessary to realign the images for accurate reconstructions. IGL Align,
also developed in the Image Graphics Laboratory, was a first attempt at aligning
grayscale images. Funding from NIH's Human Brain Project to Children's Hospital
allowed the development of a more sophisticated alignment program, sEM Align, in 1999.
sEM Align was developed to allow on-screen alignment of larger images than was
possible through the use of IGL Align. This is accomplished by displaying and moving
scaled versions of the original images on screen. Images can be incrementally moved
using keyboard input or alignments can be computed from a set of feature
correspondences specified by the user. To use the alignments computed by sEM Align, a
new set of aligned images are rendered for input into IGL Trace.
Most of the functionality of sEM Align and IGL Trace is incorporated into
RECONSTRUCTTM. By combining alignment and tracing into one program,
RECONSTRUCTTM allows images to be processed more efficiently. Tracing can be done
directly on the transformed images and alignments can be easily modified. Converters
are available to convert existing sEM Align and IGL Trace series to ones compatible with
RECONSTRUCTTM. See http://synapses.clm.utexas.edu/tools/reconstruct/formats.stm for
details.
RECONSTRUCTTM development was funded, through April, 2004, by NIH's Human Brain
Project under a grant to Dr. Kristen Harris. A Users Group was created at that time to
continue to support the RECONSTRUCTTM user community. The RECONSTRUCTTM
Users Group is available to everyone at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/reconstruct_users/. A RECONSTRUCTTM Developers
Group has been established at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/reconstruct_developers/ to
provide a forum for collaborative, open-source development. Anyone may contribute to
the next version of RECONSTRUCTTM by joining the RECONSTRUCTTM Developers
Group. Members of the Developers Group gain access to the source code and may
participate in developing the next version of RECONSTRUCTTM. The developers group
also provides additional information and links to the free development tools used for
creating the application.
Reconstruct v1.1.0.0
9