Python > Animations > Visualizing MRI Volume Slices
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Visualizing MRI Volume Slices in Python

How to create an plotly animation with slider that cycles through MRI cross-sections of a human brain.


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Visualization of MRI volume slices

In [1]:
# Import data
import time
import numpy as np

from skimage import io

vol = io.imread("https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.datacamp.com/blog_assets/attention-mri.tif")
volume = vol.T
r, c = volume[0].shape

# Define frames
import plotly.graph_objects as go
nb_frames = 68

fig = go.Figure(frames=[go.Frame(data=go.Surface(
    z=(6.7 - k * 0.1) * np.ones((r, c)),
    surfacecolor=np.flipud(volume[67 - k]),
    cmin=0, cmax=200
    ),
    name=str(k) # you need to name the frame for the animation to behave properly
    )
    for k in range(nb_frames)])

# Add data to be displayed before animation starts
fig.add_trace(go.Surface(
    z=6.7 * np.ones((r, c)),
    surfacecolor=np.flipud(volume[67]),
    colorscale='Gray',
    cmin=0, cmax=200,
    colorbar=dict(thickness=20, ticklen=4)
    ))


def frame_args(duration):
    return {
            "frame": {"duration": duration},
            "mode": "immediate",
            "fromcurrent": True,
            "transition": {"duration": duration, "easing": "linear"},
        }

sliders = [
            {
                "pad": {"b": 10, "t": 60},
                "len": 0.9,
                "x": 0.1,
                "y": 0,
                "steps": [
                    {
                        "args": [[f.name], frame_args(0)],
                        "label": str(k),
                        "method": "animate",
                    }
                    for k, f in enumerate(fig.frames)
                ],
            }
        ]

# Layout
fig.update_layout(
         title='Slices in volumetric data',
         width=600,
         height=600,
         scene=dict(
                    zaxis=dict(range=[-0.1, 6.8], autorange=False),
                    aspectratio=dict(x=1, y=1, z=1),
                    ),
         updatemenus = [
            {
                "buttons": [
                    {
                        "args": [None, frame_args(50)],
                        "label": "▶", # play symbol
                        "method": "animate",
                    },
                    {
                        "args": [[None], frame_args(0)],
                        "label": "◼", # pause symbol
                        "method": "animate",
                    },
                ],
                "direction": "left",
                "pad": {"r": 10, "t": 70},
                "type": "buttons",
                "x": 0.1,
                "y": 0,
            }
         ],
         sliders=sliders
)

fig.show()

Credit:

All credit goes to Emilia Petrisor for this excellent animation!

Here's where you can find her:

Reference

For additional information and help setting up a slider in an animation, see https://plotly.com/python/gapminder-example/. For more documentation on creating animations with Plotly, see https://plotly.com/python/#animations.

What About Dash?

Dash is an open-source framework for building analytical applications, with no Javascript required, and it is tightly integrated with the Plotly graphing library.

Learn about how to install Dash at https://dash.plot.ly/installation.

Everywhere in this page that you see fig.show(), you can display the same figure in a Dash application by passing it to the figure argument of the Graph component from the built-in dash_core_components package like this:

import plotly.graph_objects as go # or plotly.express as px
fig = go.Figure() # or any Plotly Express function e.g. px.bar(...)
# fig.add_trace( ... )
# fig.update_layout( ... )

from dash import Dash, dcc, html

app = Dash()
app.layout = html.Div([
    dcc.Graph(figure=fig)
])

app.run_server(debug=True, use_reloader=False)  # Turn off reloader if inside Jupyter