[chimerax-users] Map "Blobs" tool - Generate objects?

[Tom Goddard]

Hi Christophe,

  I fixed ChimeraX session save so that it will preserve the coloring of the blobs in session files. That will be in tonight's Chimerax builds.  If you change the image threshold it loses the coloring.

  What kind of independent object for the picked blob do you want?  What quantification are you planning to do on it?  Does it need to be an extracted subvolume?  Would the subvolume be axis-aligned, or rotated, and with how much padding?  Would it be masked so all values outside the picked blob are 0?  That creates rather horrible edges unless the mask rolls off gradually -- but roll off requires parameters and an algorithm.  Or do you just want the surface of the the blob copied?

  For picking all blobs, usually there is too much noise for that to be useful.  Maybe you would want some size cutoff.  Or maybe you would have to cull by hand -- that culling would require some new mouse mode.

  ChimeraX is primarily for interactive exploration of data, not automated processing.  Your requests could be useful features but it would need a clear use case with the details explained so we could decide whether it is useful to many people (in which case we might implement it) or is too specialized for general use.

	Tom


> On Nov 27, 2019, at 2:41 AM, Christophe Leterrier <christophe.leterrier at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I started using ChimeraX for visualization and quantification of 3D microscopy images. The "blob" tool is particularly impressive to semi-automatically segment objects of interest and measure their characteristics. However, I could not find a way to generate an independent object from the picked blobs. This makes the quantification process unreproducible as it is not possible to store the blobs in the session or automatically measure all the picked blobs. Am I wrong in the intent of the tool, or is there a way to do this?
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> --
> Christophe Leterrier
> NeuroCyto lab
> INP CNRS UMR 7051
> Aix Marseille University, France
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