Examining Phenotype Differences in Mouse Placenta with Volume Rendering and Segmentation

We present an application problem of examining phenotype differences in wildtype and retinoblastoma (Rb) knockout specimens of mouse placenta. The lack of the Rb gene causes uncontrolled tissue growth which forces infiltrations into critical sections of mouse placenta that lead to fetal death. We briefly describe our method for volume visualization of mouse placenta tissue level intermixing at a microscopic scale for both wildtype and Rb knockout types. Our technique combines non-trivial registration techniques, an TV-point correlation classifier, and a volume rendering step. Our final volume renderings show tissue intermixing differences between both wildtype and Rb knockout specimens that are not obvious from examining the two dimensional image stack alone