2015.7.17

2015.7.17

Contributors: Albert Cardona, Andrew Champion, Tom Kazimiers

Features and enhancements

Connectivity widget:

• Partners can now be filtered by a minimum threshold on number of nodes, rather
  than only being able to filter single-node partners.
• The user's review team is now an option in the partner review filter.
• Changing the review filter no longer reloads the entire widget.
• Many small performance improvements.

Selection table:

• The table layout has been streamlined with other tables in CATMAID. All
  columns except 'action columns' can now be used for sorting. Pagination is now
  done with the buttons to the right above and below the table, the page length
  can now be adjusted, too. The summary info button moved into the button panel
  while the filter input is now part of the table.
• It is now possible to add a new annotation to individual neurons without
  changing the current selection. This can be done with the little tag icon in
  the actions column on the right. The former info button was replaced by a
  small 'i' icon and clicking the folder icon in the same column will open a
  Neuron Navigator window for the respective neuron.
• All visibility related colums can be hidden with a new checkbox in the button
  panel. This might be useful to save space if a selection table is not used to
  control a 3D viewer.

Miscellaneous:

• Neuron search: annotations can now be searched for those by users in the
  review team.
• Log: entries can now be filtered to include only actions from the user's
  review team.
• The maximum number of nodes returned to the tracing overlay is now
  configurable as a server setting: NODE_LIST_MAXIMUM_COUNT (default 5000).
• Group graph: a new lock buttons in the Selection tab allows to lock selected
  nodes, so that their position doesn't change until they are unlocked again.

Bug fixes

• Fix display of intermediate nodes on edge between two joined skeletons.
• The last lines of the review widget were hidden sometimes. This is not the
  case anymore.

2015.7.6

2015.7.6

CATMAID now uses the GPLv3 license and moved away from the stricter
AGPLv3. This move was discussed with all previous contributors and
agreed on. See the corresponding commit for more details.

Contributors: Albert Cardona, Andrew Champion, Tom Kazimiers

Notes

This release includes database changes that require manual intervention if you
are upgrading from an existing installation. A new dependency is now required:
PostGIS, an extension to PostgreSQL. After its installation, it has to be
activated for the CATMAID database. To do so, connect to the database using a
Postgres system user. Assuming a Postgres system user named "postgres" and a
CATMAID database named "catmaid", this could be done by calling

sudo -u postgres psql -d catmaid

Being connected to the database, PostGIS can be enabled by executing

CREATE EXTENSION postgis;

Now PostGIS is enabled and the connection can be closed again. Now a regular
update can be performed. Please note that this update can take quite some time
to complete. On bigger neuron tracing installations, multiple hours are
realistic.

Features and enhancements

Key shortcuts / mouse operations:

• Ctrl + mouse wheel now zooms the stack, while shift zooms by smaller
  increments.
• Pressing X in the tracing tool will begin measuring distance from the current
  cursor position. The mouse wheel can be used to measure along the stack Z
  axis. Clicking will close the measurement tool and show the final distance in
  the status bar. ESC cancels the tool.

Multi-view tracing and virtual nodes:

• Orthogonal views on a regular XY stack can now also be used for neuron
  reconstruction. If they are available as CATMAID stacks and opened while the
  tracing tool is activated, tracing data will be shown in the respective
  orthogonal views as well. Tracing can be done in these views just like in the
  regular XY view.
• When tracing, it is not required anymore to place a node in every section. If
  no node has been placed in a section, CATMAID will place a so called virtual node
  where the skeleton and the section meet. If this virtual node is modified in
  any way, e.g. tagging, joining, moving, etc. it will be created. This also
  slightly changes the way reviews work. Review information is only stored on
  real nodes.
• The review widget has a new settings: in-between node step. It specifies how
  many sections can be skipped between adjacent real nodes. This is done with
  respect to the currently focused stack. This stack is also used to determine
  in which direction to move to look beyond the start of a segment.

Stack viewer:

• Other stacks in a project can be added to an open stack view by selecting the
  "Add to focused viewer" option from the stacks menu. This allows multiple
  stacks to exist in the same view like overlays, while accounting for
  differences in translation and resolution. The navigator will expand the
  available zoom levels to accomodate the maximum and minimum zoom possible in
  all of the open stacks.
• Tile layers for stacks added to a viewer can be removed from a viewer via an
  "x" in the tile layer control.
• Multiple viewers into the same stack can now be opened.
• Each stack viewer can be toggled between coupling its navigation with other
  open stack viewers. Toggle this via the "Navigate with project" checkbox in
  the tile layer control.

Tile layer:

• New filter (WebGL only): intensity thresholded transparency

3D Viewer:

• Connector restriction can now explicitly be turned on and off with a pull
  down list. One can select between "Show all" (i.e. restriction turned off),
  "All shared connectors" will only show connectors with partners in the current
  selection and "All pre->post connectors" will only allow connectors with at
  least one presynaptic partner and one postsynaptic partner in the current
  selection. The last option, "All group shared" allows to select two skeleton
  sources (e.g. two selection table) and it will only show connectors that are
  part of the 3D viewer and that connect between both selected groups of
  skeletons. There is also a pre->post enforcing variant of it.

Neuron search:

• The name displayed for neurons now follows the same naming mechanism used for
  other widgets. It can be controlled through the settings widget and will
  automatically update if a neuron name is changed.

Miscellaneous:

• In the connectivity widget, upstream and downstream thresholds can now be set
  at once for all seed neurons. Two drop down controls used for this will be
  displayed if there is more than one seed neuron.
• Treenode Table refurbishing: far faster, supports multiple skeletons, can do
  tag search with regular expressions and lists the skeleton treenode ID.
• Rows and columns of the connectivity matrix can now be moved around with
  little buttons that appear when the mouse is over row and column header cells.
• There are now three options to change focus if a pointer enters a window:
  don't change focus (how it has been so far), focus stacks (will activate
  stacks when hovered, but won't change focus for other windows) and focus all
  (will change focus to every window hovered). The default will be stack focus
  follows the pointer. The settings widget makes these options available in
  general settings area.
• There are three new controls in the split/merge dialog: Toggle the
  display of input and output markers on neurons in the embedded 3D viewer and
  select which shading method is used (default: "active node split").
  Alternatively, "Strahler index" coloring can be used, which helps with
  depth perception.
• Attempting to reload a CATMAID browser tab or go back in history, will now
  result in a warning dialog, asking for confirmation. It makes clear that
  CATMAID's window layout and content won't be saved if the acton isn't
  canceled.

Administration:

• Now that virtual nodes are available, existing database can (but don't have
  to) be optimized. A new management command will look for straight skeleton
  parts that are not referenced in any way and prunes them. In other words, if
  there are three successive collinear nodes and the middle one is not
  referenced, it will be removed.

  manage.py catmaid_prune_skeletons

Bug fixes

• The Neuron Search widget doesn't throw an error anymore when a neuron listed
  in it is merged.
• There is no longer a race condition in the database during concurrent
  split/merge of a skeleton and creation of a treenode in that skeleton. While
  this is not a comprehensive guarantee of conflict-free concurrency, it does
  remove the most likely scenario resulting in corruption of the database model.

2015.5.27

2015.5.27

Bug fixes

• Fix radius based neuron selection in tracing window.

2015.5.19

2015.5.19

Contributors: Tom Kazimiers

Features and enhancements

Key shortcuts / mouse operations:

• Cycling through open end nodes will now only visit the root node if it is an
  actual leaf. That is, when it has only one child node and is untagged.

3D Viewer:

• A light background shading variant for connectors was added. It uses a darker
  cyan color which provides more contrast if a white background is used.

Miscellaneous:

• The location of messages and notifications can be configured in the settings
  widget. The default location is still the upper right corner.
• If the node display limit is hit while panning the field of view in tracing
  mode, node refresh will be temporary disabled. Once the mouse button is
  released again an no further panning happens within one second, node update is
  reset to normal. This allows for smoother panning if many nodes are visible.

Bug fixes

Review system:

• Review teams are now respected when Shift + W is used to jump to the next
  unreviewed node.

3D viewer:

• Skeletons with other coloring than "Source", will now be visible when exported
  as SVG in the 3D viewer.

Miscellaneous:

• Skeletons added to a selection table, will now honor the table's "global"
  settings for pre, post, meta and text visibility.
• If an annotation is removed from a neuron, the annotation itself will be
  deleted, too, if it is not used anywhere else. Now also meta annotations of
  the deleted annotation will be removed (and their meta annotations...), if
  they are not used anywhere else.

Release 2015.5.11

Contributors: Albert Cardona, Andrew Champion, Tom Kazimiers

Features and enhancements

Connectivity widget:

• Partner filtering now supports regular expressions when the first character
  of the search input is "/".

Treenode table:

• REMOVED: Radii can no longer be edited by clicking on their cell in the
  table.

Connectivity matrix:

• The tracing tool has got a new widget: a connectivity matrix. It can be opened
  with the "M" frame icon next to the button for the connectivity widget. To use
  it, one has to append skeletons for its rows and columns. Skeletons can also
  be added as group. Each cell shows two sub-cells, the first one shows the
  number of synapses from row to column and the second one the number synapses
  from column to row. When a synapse count number is clicked, a connector
  selection is opened, that contains the corresponding synapses. Both pre- and
  post-synaptic count cells can be colored individually. By default a coloring
  similar to the tracing layer's red and cyan is used. There are also color
  gradients available to produce heat maps (i.e. color cells based on the
  actual synapse count).

Graph widget:

• ability to split neurons by text tag on their skeletons. It's the
  "Tag" button under the "Subgraph" tab. Enables you to manually define regions
  on a neuronal arbor (like axon and dendrite, or multiple dendritic domains)
  and then have them be represented each as a node in the graph. The skeleton
  will be virtually cut at the nodes containing the tags, with the tagged node
  belonging to the downstream part (relative to the root node).

3D Viewer:

• Color mode "Downstream of tag" is now a shading mode.
• New synapse coloring mode "Same as skeleton". If you then hide the
  skeletons and show only the synapses you will e.g. see spatial tiling of ORN
  axons, each defining a glomerulus in the larval olfactory lobe.
• For PNG and SVG export one can now specify the dimensions of the result files.
  A dialog shown before exporting asks for width and height.

Neuron dendrogram:

• The horizontal and vertical spacing between nodes in the neuron dendrogram can
  now be fine tuned.

Administration:

• A new tool 'Group membership helper' has been added to add multiple users to
  multiple groups or to revoke their group membership. This can be used to
  control access over the data created by individual users.

Miscellaneous:

• A node-placement-and-radius-edit mode has been added. If enabled through the
  settings widget (Tracing > "Edit radius after node creation"), the radius for
  a node will be edited immediately after it has been created. This allows for
  easier volumetric reconstruction. In this mode, the radius circle editing tool
  is used to specify the radius. No dialog is shown once a radius is selected for
  a node and it will only be saved for the new node.
• A new connector type ("abutting") can now be created. In contrast to the
  regular synaptic connector, it can be used to represent the fact that two or
  more neurons are in abutting processes. For now this mode can be activated
  through the settings widget (Tracing > "Create abutting connectors"). For
  abutting connectors the lines representing the links to nodes will appear in a
  green color.

Bug fixes

3D viewer:

• Adding and removing neurons and static data lead in some situations to many
  errors that were displayed on the console (and therefore not visible to most
  users) and caused minor performance problems. This has been fixed and all data
  should now be added and removed correctly.
• Following the active node should now work much more reliable. Before, it could
  happen that this stopped working after a second 3D viewer was closed.

Connectivity widget:

• Fix one cause of sluggish behavior for widgets that have been modified many
  times. Also fixes repeated alert dialogs when clicking a neuron in the
  partner tables that no longer exists or does not have any treenodes.

Neuron Navigator:

• Don't show an error if an invalid regular expression was entered for
  searching. Instead, color the search box red and show a warning message.

Release 2015.3.31

Contributors: Albert Cardona, Andrew Champion, Tom Kazimiers, Stephan Gerhard

Features and enhancements

Key shortcuts / mouse operations:

• Shift+T removes all tags from the currently active node.
• After using R to go the nearest open leaf, shift+R cycles through other open
  leaves in the skeleton in order of ascending distance from the starting
  location. Combining alt with these operations orders open leaves by most
  recent creation instead of distance.
• Ctrl+Y removes the active skeleton from the last used selection widget.
• Shift+Y selects skeletons within a radius of the active node in the tracing
  layer and adds them to the last used selection widget. Ctrl+shift+Y works in
  the same way to remove skeletons from the last used selection widget.
• If the next (or previous) branch/end point is already selected when V (or B)
  is pressed, the view will center on it nevertheless.
• If the mouse is over the stack when zooming, the view will recenter so that
  the same stack location remains under the mouse at the new scale.
• During review, Q and W during will refocus on the last reviewed neuron if
  review is interrupted (another node is selected), regardless of the auto
  centering setting. If one looks beyond the current segment, the last reviewed
  node will be selected by Q and W as well, but auto centering is respected.

Review system:

• New "Reviewer Team" system allows filtering reviews in visualizations and
  statistics to include only those by particular reviewers. Each user can
  control which reviewers to include in her team. A date can be configured for
  each reviewer in the team, so that only reviews from that reviewer after this
  date are included.
  • A user's reviewer team is configured through the Settings widget.
  • The review widget includes a team column between the user and union columns.
  • The percent reviewed column in the selection widget can be set to team or
    union.
  • Team review coloring is available in the 3D viewer and group graph.

3D viewer:

• With Ctrl + mouse wheel, only the camera is moved in target direction, the
  target stays fixed. If Alt + mouse wheel is used, the target moves as well.
• The CSV export not also includes the parent ID for each node, which can be
  used to reconstruct the topological tree.
• The auto-created selection widget is now 50% smaller, giving more vertical
  space to the 3D viewer.
• With the help of controls of the Animation tab, simple animations can be
  played. Currently, rotation around the X, Y and Z axis as well as the current
  "up" direction of the camera. is supported. The back-and-forth mode will
  reverse rotation direction once a full circle is reached. With the help of the
  stepwise visibility option, individual neurons can be made visible after a
  certain amount of time the animation is running. Additionally, neurons can be
  made sequentially visible after each rotation.
• Animations can also be exported as WebM movie file. The "Export animation"
  button in the Export tab, will show a dialog with basic export settings. Like
  with the other view export options, the current 3D view setup is used. The
  frame size can be adjusted in the export dialog. Creating the file can take
  some seconds and currently only works for the Chrome browser (due to the lack
  of WebP support in others). The resulting WebM video file can be converted to
  any other format using e.g. VLC player, if needed.
• New shading mode "synapse-free chunks". Has one parameter, the minimum amount
  of synapse-free cable to consider between two consecutive synapses, adjustable
  from the "Shading Parameters" tab.
• New shading mode "dendritic backbone". Depends on 'microtubules end' tags, or
  will approximate twigs by using the Strahler number entered in the "Shading
  Parameters" tab.
• The view settings tab now contains a control to scale the size of the node
  handles (e.g. active node, special tags).

Tile layer:

• Tiles can now be rendered with WebGL, which enables new visualization features
  and fixes some flickering issues. Enable via "Prefer WebGL Layers" in
  Settings. The WebGL renderer is currently considered experimental and may have
  stability issues on some clients. See
  #186 (comment) for
  details on using WebGL layers with your image stack host.
• The blend mode used to combine stacks and overlays is now configurable when
  using WebGL. This greatly improves visualization of confocal and other
  multichannel data. Blend mode is selectable from the layers control, activated
  via the toggle at the bottom left of the stack view.
• Filters can be applied to layers when using WebGL. Filters can be added and
  removed from layers through the layers control. Available filters currently
  include:
  • Gaussian blur
  • Color inversion
  • Brightness, contrast and saturation adjustment
  • Color matrix transform

Connectivity widget:

• It is now possible to remove added neurons again. Each row of the table of
  target neurons now contains a small 'x' icon in the first column to remove it.
• The selection column is not included anymore in the CSV export.

Analyze Arbor:

• Options are provided to approximate twigs by using a branch Strahler number
  defined in the "Options".
• Dimensions of the pie charts and XY plots is now configurable from the
  "Options" dialog.

Graph widget:

• New button to "Clone" the graph widget: opens a new widget with identical content.
• New buttons to "Save" and "Open..." to/from JSON, so that complex graphs can be
  reloaded later on. Skeletons not present in the database are not loaded.

Miscellaneous:

• Selecting tags for highlighting in the neuron dendrogram
• Synchronization between widgets was improved. Deleting a neuron in one widget,
  will remove it from other widgets as well.
• Hovering over the CATMAID text on the front page will display CATMAID's
  version.

Admin:

• For projects, stacks, overlays and data views there is now the option to
  duplicate objects from within the admin view. To copy objects without their
  relations, there is now a new action in the list view's action menu. To
  duplicate an entity with its relations, select the object and use the "save as
  new" button.

Export:

• A basic JSON export of all treenodes and connectors of the selected neurons is
  now possible.

Bug fixes

Tracing overlay:

• Trying to remove a non-existent tag from a node now doesn't show an error
  dialog anymore, but only a notification.

Key shortcuts / mouse operations:

• Fix bug where tagged nodes were not considered open by R regardless of tag
  content.

Neuron search:

• Make neuron names wrap and use the next line, if there is not enough space for
  it. This makes the table not expand in width until the name fits anymore.

3D viewer:

• Picking a synapse or other selectable elements is now more robust and now
  works also in orthographic mode.
• The projection mode (orthographic or perspective) is now also stored in a
  saved view.
• The 3D viewer's drawing canvas is now correctly sized again. Since the tab
  panel has been introduced, the 3D viewer has been too high. Now the
  pre-defined views (XY, XZ, ZY, ZX) are display correctly again, i.e. the whole
  bounding box is now seen again.
• Performance enhancement when smoothing skeletons with a Gaussian by avoiding
  to update the same Vector3 instances twice.

Reviews:

• Pressing 'E' during review will now go to the next unreviewed segment as seen
  from the currently reviewed one. Before, the first unreviewed segment as seen
  from the top of the table was selected.
• Pressing 'Q' on the first node (leaf) brings one back one section to check if
  the segment really ends. Pressing 'W' afterwards now brings one back to the
  first node, not the second like it has been before.

Connectivity widget:

• CSV export works again.

Miscellaneous:

• Vertical resizing of widgets now doesn't lead to strange size changes anymore.
• An alternative DVID tile source was added to support its multiscale API.

Release 2015.1.21

Contributors: Albert Cardona, Andrew Champion, Tom Kazimiers

Features and enhancements

General neuron tracing:

• A new radius editing option has been added that propagates from the current
  node root-ward to the previous node with an undefined radius (exclusive).
  Here undefined is taken to be a negative radius, since though the column
  default is 0 Django initializes it to -1.

Miscellaneous:

• Users need now to confirm the closing of the last stack.

Bug fixes

Tracing overlay:

• A label is now hidden when the mouse hovers over it. Note that this only works
  for one label at a time, so it is not effective for overlapping labels. A
  robust solution would require more expensive event propagation over label
  elements.
• Fullscreen on OS X Safari should now work, too.
• Nodes and arrows are now drawn in order: lines, arrows, nodes, labels
• Fix bug that could occur during radius propagation when the previous node
  already had a radius defined.
• Fix mouse handlers of node and error drawing, which were broken by adding
  ordered drawing.

Synapse clustering:

• A long-standing error has been fixed where a few nodes where added to an
  undefined cluster.

Group graph:

• The root node computation has been fixed.
• Listing edge synapses now also works with split grouped neurons.

3D viewer:

• Make synapse clustering fetch synapses properly (like it is done in the Group
  Graph).

Release 2015.1.15

Key shortcuts / mouse operations:

• A new shortcut key to navigate to a node's child has been added: ]. It
  behaves like V by navigating to the largest descendant branch. With
  Shift+] one cycles through sibling branches in order of descending
  size.
• For consistency, the P shortcut to navigate to the parent has been
  replaced with [.
• Navigation to the next branch has changed a bit: The V key now moves
  to the next branch node or end of the largest descendant branch of the
  active node, and subsequent presses of shift+V cycle through other
  possible descending branches in order of decreasing size.
• While editing the radius of a node with the help of the surrounding
  circle, a click will confirm the current radius (not only pressing 'o'
  again). The radius editing can now also be canceled with the Esc key.
• With Ctrl+Alt+click one can now insert a node into the active
  skeleton between two existing nodes.

Zoom:

• Zooming is now also possible in smaller steps. The plus and minus
  buttons zoom in steps of 1 and with having the Shift key pressed
  additionally, steps of 0.1 are used.

3D viewer:

• New export options (Export tab):
  • CVS representation of the rendered skeletons;
  • PNG and SVG image of the current view;
  • SVG catalogue of the current view. The catalogue contains each
    neuron a separate panel on the same SVG document--very useful to
    generate figures for a paper. Options are provided to sort and arrange
    panels, and to define pinned neurons that appear in each panel (e.g. a
    somatosensory axon that acts as reference for each neuron connected to
    it).
• New "Spatial select" button (Main tab) that allows to select
  skeletons near the active node or connected to the active skeleton,
  within a specified distance. Matching skeletons will be shown in a new
  selection table. This is useful to e.g. select all single-node
  skeletons connected to the dorsal lobe part of a Kenyon cell.
• Supports orthographic projection (see checkbox in View tab) so that
  no perspective distortion is applied and distances become comparable
  between different parts of the view.
• The 3D viewer now has the option to follow the active node (View
  tab). This acts like clicking "Center active" after each active node
  change.
• One can bookmark views in the 3D viewer, by pressing "Save view" in
  the Main tab. Views can be loaded by selecting them from the drop down
  list next to the button. These bookmarks are currently discarded once
  CATMAID is reloaded.
• When Ctrl is pressed while zooming in the 3D viewer with the scroll
  wheel, the camera is actually moved towards its target. This is useful
  to overcome zooming limits and strong perspective distortion due to a
  high focal length when zooming.

Selection table:

• "Randomize colors" in the selection table was replaced by a drop
  down list with different color schemes and the button "Colorize" to
  apply the selected one. The default is the coloring scheme that
  existed before. Some of the new color schemes are from Cynthia Brewer
  (see http://colorbrewer2.org/ ).
• Neurons are activated by clicking on the name, like in all other
  widgets. The green tick icon has been removed.
• New check box for each neuron called "meta" to toggle the display of
  extra information like the orange spheres for specially tagged nodes
  (TODO, uncertain end, etc.) or low confidence nodes.

Dendrogram:

• Can now collapse nodes belonging to a branch that ends in a node
  tagged "not a branch".
• One can now highlight multiple tags in the dendrogram by separating
  them with commas.

Graph widget:

• Subgraphs (like axon & dendrite) can now be reset in the graph widget.

Annotations:

• When adding an annotation, the pattern "{nX}" can be used to add an
  automatically incrementing number to each neuron annotated, starting
  at X. So if e.g. three neurons are annotated at once with the
  annotation "test-{n5}", the first one is annotated with "test-5", the
  second one with "test-6" and the last one with "test-7". Omitting X
  will be interpreted to start from 1.
• When skeletons are joined, the name of the "losing" skeleton can now
  be added as an annotation to the "winning" skeleton right in the
  dialog. Its checkbox is unchecked by default, if the name follows the
  auto-generated name pattern "neuron 12345".

Searching:

• The neuron name input boxes in both search widgets will now remember
  entries that have been used before.

Handling the unexpected:

• A general error handler has been added so that CATMAID should
  hopefully not crash anymore, even if an error occurs. In such
  situations an error dialog is shown and the error is logged on the
  server so that we can investigate better what went wrong.

General neuron tracing:

• A robust synapse clustering method was added: centrifugal synapse flow
  centrality. Many widgets now support a new method for finding axons based on it
  (e.g. in the 3D viewer as a shading method.
• The connector table now displays the confidence of each link
• Basic import/export support was added. There are two new management commands
  that can be used by admins to import and export tracing data.

Users and groups:

• Support user registration (disabled by default). Default user groups for new
  users can be set.

Miscellaneous:

• A new ROI tool was added, which can be activated for each user through the
  user settings. It currently supports only the creation of new ROIs. Additional
  sub-tools will be added for more functionality.

Contributors:

This update brought to you by Tom Kazimiers, Andrew Champion, Stephan
Gerhard and Albert Cardona.