10/25/05
We will present the new interactive laplacian multi-resolution fitting approach at the Vision, Modeling, and Visualization 2005, November 16-18, 2005 in Erlangen, Germany.
Oliver Passon, Maik Boltes, Stefan Birmanns, Herwig Zilken, Willy Wriggers, Laplace-filter enhanced haptic rendering of macromolecules.

06/13/05
We will present a poster about the new feature-based multi-resolution fitting approach at the 3rd Conference Modeling of Protein Interactions in Genomes, June 26-28, 2005 in Lawrence, KS.
Stefan Birmanns, Willy Wriggers, Feature-Based Shape Description for Multi-Resolution Docking of Macromolecular Assemblies.

05/16/05
We will present a poster about the new feature-based docking approach at the 10th Annual Structural Biology Symposium, May 20-21, 2005 in Galveston, TX.
Stefan Birmanns, Willy Wriggers, Feature-Based Shape Description for Multi-Resolution Docking of Macromolecular Assemblies.

02/10/05
We will present a poster about the new load-balancing scheme for haptic and visual rendering and a new Laplacian filtering approach for higher docking precision at the Biophysical Society Meeting (February 12-16) in Long Beach, CA.
Stefan Birmanns, Oliver Passon, Maik Boltes, Chance Coble, Willy Wriggers, Interactive Multi-Resolution Modeling by Adaptive Visuo-Haptic Rendering and Laplacian Filtering

12/06/04
Paul Boyle, 24, one of the main SenSitus developers died on Monday morning (11/29/2004) in a car accident. Paul was a student at the University of Texas, Health Science Center at Houston, only a couple of months before graduation. The thoughts of the SenSitus developer team are with the Boyle family in this moment of tragedy.

09/29/04
Stefan Birmanns will demonstrate SenSitus at the Keck Center/HAMBP Annual Research Conference (October 8) in Houston, Texas (Hilton Houston NASA Clear Lake, 3000 NASA Road One, Houston).

09/10/04
Stefan Birmanns will present the new load-balancing scheme for haptic and visual rendering based on mesh-simplification at the IEEE Mechatronics and Robotics (September 13-15) in Aachen, Germany.

03/15/04
SensAble will demonstrate SenSitus at their booth at the VR2004 (March 27-31) in Chicago.

02/17/04
Stefan Birmanns will present SenSitus at the seminar series about biostatistics at the School of Public Health (UT Houston, 1200 Hermann Pressler Dr. Houston, Texas). The talk will be on March 1st at 12pm, Room RAS 705.

02/11/04
Stefan Birmanns will present SenSitus at the HSEMB, 21st Annual Houston Conference on Biomedical Engineering Research.

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SenSitus is an interactive docking and visualization program for low-resolution density maps and atomic structures. We are developing SenSitus as a GUI-based alternative to certain Situs docking programs that can benefit from an interactive user interface and 3D visualization methods.

Situs is a program package developed to provide a robust and quantitative method for the localization of biomolecular subunits in low-resolution data. SenSitus can visualize the data files used by the Situs programs - the Situs file format for the low resolution EM maps and the PDB file format for the biomolecular structures.

We follow a modular development concept and have sourced out the visualization methods to an external library named SVT.

This software library also provides support for Virtual Reality environments like e.g. Geowalls, Holobenches or even CAVEs. Although VR environments can assist a user significantly during any interactive task, a lot of labs still don't have access to a VR facility. Therefore we also support standard graphics workstations or Windows PCs.

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SVT relies on OpenGL for the actual 3D graphics output - the defacto standard for professional interactive computer graphics. To ensure that SenSitus is easy and intuitively to use we added a graphical user interface by the help of the library QT.

Beside the visualization features commonly used by Situs users and biophysical researchers, SenSitus offers also a specialized interactive fitting tool. By the help of haptic rendering and virtual reality we support the interactive docking process of a high-resolution xray structure into a low-resolution electron density map.

Haptic rendering means that we adopt force feedback devices like the Phantom to guide the user to a better fitting location. To generate an appropriate force we apply a correlation coefficient, which is also used by algorithmic fitting programs. In order to provide the force update rates one needs for high-quality haptic rendering, we employ self organize feature maps and vector quantization to simplify the calculation.

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Even if you don't have a haptic device you can use the force calculation for an automatic refinement of your interactively found fitting position and orientation.

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SenSitus and the underlying libraries are very portable - nevertheless we saw a major shift towards Linux in the last years. Therefore we halted the support for some other Unix derivates and only support Linux, SGI/Irix and Windows for now.

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SenSitus replaces the program Volslice3D, which is no longer supported. SenSitus includes all of the Volslice3D functionality.

Stefan Birmanns, Maik Boltes, Herwig Zilken, and Willy Wriggers. Adaptive Visuo-Haptic Rendering for Hybrid Modeling of Macromolecular Assemblies. Proceedings of the international IEEE conference on Mechatronics and Robotics 2004, 4:1351-1356, Eysoldt Verlag, Germany, ISBN: 3-938153-30-X.

Stefan Birmanns and Willy Wriggers. Interactive Fitting Augmented by Force-Feedback and Virtual Reality. J. Struct. Biol., 2003, 144:123-131.

Willy Wriggers, Pablo Chacón, Julio Kovacs, Florence Tama and Stefan Birmanns. Topology Representing Neural Networks Reconcile Biomolecular Shape, Structure, and Dynamics. Neurocomputing., 2004, 56:365-379.

Willy Wriggers and Stefan Birmanns. Using Situs for Flexible and Rigid-Body Fitting of Multi-Resolution Single Molecule Data. J. Struct. Biol., 2001, Vol. 133, pp. 193-202.

This work is supported by the Human Frontier Science Program (Grant RGP0026/2003).