Digital imaging spectroscopy (DIS) combines image processing and optical spectroscopy such that each picture element (pixel) or group of pixels in a two dimensional scene also includes additional dimension(s) of spectral and/or temporal information. Imaging spectrophotometers developed at KAIROS are literally equivalent to hundreds of thousands of conventional spectrophotometers running in parallel, i.e., each pixel is functionally equivalent to a single 'instrument'. Because of the amount of data acquired by this massively parallel technique - often in the gigabyte range for a single experiment - it was necessary to develop a new generation of graphical tools for data analysis and display. A unifying theme in our software development is the use of multispectral color contour plots to concisely represent data from a variety of different imaging experiments. Typically, the rows of a color contour plot represent encoded information for individual pixels. The columns of a contour plot represent the values of the variable that are being measured: absorbance, reflectance, fluorescence, FRET, or time course (kinetic) data. Contour plots are very powerful for classifying pixels with similar properties; therefore, these areas within the image can be 'back-painted' with a specific pseudocolor. Numerous sorting algorithms can be applied to the contour plot to map spectral and kinetic information back onto the spatial representation in run-time. Guided by the heuristics of parameters input by the user, the application of sorting algorithms to contour plots results in a near optimal interface between machine and human intelligence for the visualization of hyperspectral and/or hypertemporal images. In addition to a general introduction to the DIS graphical user interface, we demonstrate this new technology on H&E stained tissue.

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