A window enable to visualize one or several objects. These objects can have the same type (e.g. : 2 meshes for the brain hemispheres) or different types (e.g. : a mesh and a volume). Windows have a name, for example A(2):anat.vimg. This name means that the window is the second axial window and contains the volume anat.vimg. It is possible to handle windows individually or in groups.
There are several ways to open a window :
- Menu Windows => <Choose window's type>
- Click on window type icon
When using Anatomist intensively, users often get entangled in several dozens of Anatomist windows. Windows titles and numbering is often not enough to distinguish them in the main control window and on the desktop. To help finding out the correspondance between windows listed in the control window and the actual displayed ones, there are some hints:
- Moving the mouse cursor over a window name in the main control window should highlight the corresponding view (in light blue). (this feature appeared in Anatomist 4.3).
- In the same way, when dragging objects onto windows in the control window, the target window(s) will also highlight in light blue.
- double-clicking on a window in the list will make the corresponding window to get displayed on top, and to un-iconify if it was iconified or hidden.
Windows enable to visualize objects after their loading. Note that visualization is different from loading. Indeed, loading gives raw data that can be visualized in various way. For example, you can change the display convention without modifying the data. See the section called “Load and display objects” for more details.
The table below shows the different window types.
Table 4.1. Windows
| Icon | Description |
|---|---|
 | 2D Axial window - Visualization of volumes. |
 | 2D Coronal window - Visualization of volumes. |
 | 2D Sagittal window - Visualization of volumes. |
 | |
 | 3D window - Visualization of 2D objects and 3D objects (for example meshes). |
 | Browser - Visualization of object attributes, window content or structured objects. |
 | Profile - Visualization of grey levels range along an axis. |
Histogram - Visualization of grey levels histogram. |
Additional windows types may be provided in plugins.
2D and 3D windows are actually different modes of the same window type: you can switch from one type to another by clicking on the icons on window's top bar.
This type of window enables to see an oblique slice and buckets (set of voxels), that are displayed differently in 2D and in 3D. This window enables to keep the slice orientation as if you were in a 3D window but to display buckets as if you were in a 2D window.
The following images show the difference between 3D, 2D and oblique windows for MRI and ROI visualization :
