Augmented Reality
Our research team at Utrecht University presents 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 direct and indirect relations between topics published in the neuroscience literature.
Overview of the January 2024 version of the DatAR prototype
(a) The brain region Hippocampus has a direct relation (pink sphere) with the brain disease Depressive Disorder.
Genes are selected as the intermediate topic to explore an indirect relation (green sphere) between the brain region Hippocampus and the brain disease Alexander Disease.
(b) The brain disease Bipolar Disorder has a direct relation (pink sphere) with the brain region Cerebral Hemisphere Structure.
Mental processes are selected as the intermediate topic to find an indirect relation (green sphere) between the brain disease Bipolar Disorder and the brain region Cerebellar vermis. Topics with no direct or indirect relations are visualised as light blue spheres.
Exploring Relations between Topics
Topic-based literature exploration is a useful means to analyse many publications simultaneously because it provides an overview of relations between topics.
- A co-occurrence of two topics, for instance, the brain region Hippocampus and the brain disease Depression, is specified when they appear within the same sentence of a publication’s title or abstract.
- This co-occurrence implies a direct relation between the brain region and the brain disease.
Knowledge Graph of Brain Science repository *
The Brain Science Knowledge Graph repository contains an analysis of sentences in the titles and abstracts of 414 224 neuroscience publications in PubMed (2010- 2022) with a total of 10,000 co-occurrences.
The brain region Hippocampus (left column), co-occurs 623 times (middle column) with the brain disease Depressive Disorder (right column).
Access to the repository can be provided on request.
Using Augmented Reality
3D spatial representation visualises the relative locations of brain regions
Displaying 3D visualisations together with the real world allows researchers to better integrate the literature exploration process in their daily research work.
October 2023 for Brain Regions Visualisation
June 2021 for DatAR 3D AR prototype
