The HRA Organ Gallery Affords Immersive Superpowers for Building and Exploring the Human Reference Atlas with Virtual Reality

• DOI: 10.1101/2023.02.13.528002
• Publication Date: 2023-02-15T16:25:46Z
• Authors: Andreas Bueckle; Catherine Qing; Shefali Luley; Yash Kumar; Naval Pandey; Katy Börner
• Keywords: 0303 health sciences; 03 medical and health sciences; Bioinformatics; Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics; R858-859.7; virtual reality; informatics; interaction; data visualization; atlassing; information visualization; Article

The Human Reference Atlas (HRA, https://humanatlas.io ) funded by the NIH Biomolecular Program (HuBMAP, https://commonfund.nih.gov/hubmap and other projects engages 17 international consortia to create a spatial reference of healthy adult human body at single-cell resolution. specimen, biological structure, data that define HRA are disparate in nature benefit from visually explicit method integration. Virtual reality (VR) offers unique means enable users explore complex structures threedimensional (3D) immersive environment. On 2D desktop application, 3D spatiality real-world size organs atlas is hard understand. If viewed VR, tissue blocks mapped can be explored their true way goes beyond traditional user interfaces. Added visualizations then provide data-rich context. In this paper, we present Organ Gallery, VR application an integrated Presently, Gallery features 55 organs,1,203 292 demographically diverse donors 15 providers link 5,000+ datasets; it also prototype cell type distributions protein structures. We outline our plans support two use cases: