How to create a specific Visual?

I am working with fMRI data to generate a brain connectivity map. My script produces a 128x128x128 cell array and in each individual cell there is a vector containing the indices of all the other cells that are connected to it.

What I want to generate is a visual of a 128x128x128 cube with lines drawn showing connections between the individual cells.

Any ideas on how I can do this??

Thanks!

Answer 1

[Ghada Saleh]

Hi Kianna,

I understand you want to visualize the connections between different data points stored in a cell array. I tried to visualize the connections on a smaller data set(2x2x2) than the one you are using. So I first created the cell array that contains the data as follows:

n = 2;
M{1,1,1} = [3 4];
M{1,1,2} = 1;
M{1,2,1} = [5 6 7];
M{1,2,2} = [7 1];
M{2,1,1} = [2 8 4];
M{2,1,2} = [2 5];
M{2,2,1} = 3 ;
M{2,2,2} = [3 5];

where each number (1:8) represent an index from the indices vector as follows:

indices = [1 1 1;1 1 2; 1 2 1; 1 2 2;2 1 1; 2 1 2; 2 2 1; 2 2 2];

Finally, you can create a matrix that contains all connection and separate each two 3D points by a 'nan' to make sure that MATLAB does not add unnecessary connections between points. Here is a sample code demonstrating this:

plotM = [];
for i = 1: n
  for j = 1:n
      for k = 1:n
          newPoint = M{i,j,k};
          numOfConnections = length(newPoint);
          for l = 1: numOfConnections
              p = indices(newPoint(l),:);
              newM = [i j k; p ; nan nan nan];
              plotM = [plotM ;newM];
          end  
      end
  end
end
plot3(plotM(:,1),plotM(:,2),plotM(:,3),'b');

You can simply generalize that code by using your data set instead of 'M' and put 'n = 128'.

I hope this helps,

Ghada