Interactive and dynamic web-based visual exploration of high dimensional bioimages with real time clustering

Abstract

Web browsers and web applications have become common tools in bioinformatics over the past decades. Many existing web applications revolve around server-client interaction, where heavy computational tasks are often outsourced to the server and the presentation is handled on the the client-side. However more recent additions to the web browser technology embrace the capability of handling more complex operations on the client-side itself, cutting out most of the server-client interaction except for data loading. This paper contributes to the exploration of the potential of approaches to implement and speed up computational expensive tasks, like image cluster analysis, within a client-side web browser environment. The experimental results, incorporating the well known k-means algorithm which serves as a platform for various parallelization approaches, indicate the possibility to achieve real time image clustering. Especially for the available MALDI-MSI data set the results look promising. Despite good results of multithreading approaches, algorithmic approaches appear to be relevant too. Therefore advancements in accelerating the k-means algorithm itself are considered.