Pan_Zoom

Presently the Pan_Zoom module accomplishes the simple task of superimposing onto the images the lines that show the positions of the other slices in the display. The information necessary for locating and color coding these lines is received by Pan_Zoom from a Slicer module. In the future, the main task of the Pan_Zoom module will be to window, translate, and zoom the slices before sending them to a display module. For the moment these capabilities are provided by the AVS module image viewer; image viewer is a flexible tool for displaying images, but it is also the data-flow bottleneck of the visualization. Before being displayed by an image viewer module, the images must go through many communication steps: from the processing node of the CM-5 to its partition manger memory, from the partition manager to the AVS-server, and finally to the X-server. Future developments in CM-5 hardware and software should enable to send the data directly from the CM-5 nodes to an X-server, without passing through the partition manager, thus speeding up the whole visualization. However, when these fast communications are possible, Pan_Zoom will need to have the pan and zoom capabilities now provided by image viewer.