Figure 1.

Generation of Plurigon structure and its general manipulation. (A) Initial Plurigon backbone creation. An illustration of vertex placement through spiral tracing. A set of 50 points was placed on the sphere at approximately equal distances from each other. (B) Plurigon polygonal basic structure. Convex hull generated from the vertices shown in (A). This is the completed version of the Plurigon prototype; radial distance to the core remains constant for all vertices. (C) Laplacian smoothing in progress. Data was taken from a subset of gene expression values from murine genomic expression data. Iterations shown are i, ii, iii, iv, and v, afterwards, the movement of points becomes negligible, so iteration is stopped. (D) Initial Plurigon interface. The basic start-up Plurigon is depicted in an image window. (E) Simple and advanced Plurigon operations. Pressing “o” initiates the ability to choose a specific file to be depicted (1). Loading and pre-processing of data text file results in the generation of the basic color-coded Plurigon (2). Rotation of the Plurigon in all three dimensions is achieved using the up/down and left/right cursor keys. Addition of any other visualization features onto the Plurigon does not affect the rotational capacity. Pressing “x” generates the superimposition of x, y, and z axes onto the Plurigon (3). Pressing “x” while the three axes are present toggles the axes off. This action format is conserved for all other forms of Plurigon visualization. Pressing “c” superimposes the vector position for the Plurigon center of mass (COM) (4). This COM is represented by a red line. Pressing “+” or “−” generates an ability to zoom in and out of the Plurigon (5). A 3-dimensional (3-D) viewing version of the Plurigon is generated by pressing the number “3” (6). Pressing “3” again while in the 3-D mode removes this visualization format. Simple output of basic Plurigon structural information is achieved by pressing “i” (7). The ability to save a TIFF picture file of the window view of the Plurigon is achieved by pressing “s.” For each of the functions, sequential superimposition upon the Plurigon can be achieved using the respective key functions. For export to further 3-D viewing applications a.vrml/.wrl file of the Plurigon can be generated by pressing “v” (8). The image depicted is viewed using a Cortona-3D viewing application (www.cortona3d.com/Products/Viewer/Cortona-3D-Viewer.aspx).