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The LMM Bio-Investigation, which flew aboard STS-133
and then STS-134, was successful in that it demonstrated
that LMM has the capability and potential
for performing biological investigations aboard the
International Space Station.
However, one of the lessons we learned
from the LMM Bio-Investigation is that we needed a better way
to provide data to the Principal Investigators
so that they could view it and access it easily.
This LMM tool helps scientists because before, scientists had
to sift through the data.
There were a lot of directories that they had to go
through manually, and it took a lot of time and a lot
of patience in order to look through it all,
and even if they had the patience and the time,
they might have not understood what they were looking at,
because it was raw data.
So what LMMING does is it basically sifts
through all the data for them so that they don't have to do it,
and then it displays it discreetly on the screen.
So when you want to download LMMING onto your computer,
what you have to do is you have to download an entire file.
What's in this file is a lot of data and files
that are important to LMMING in order to work,
and basically how you interact with LMMING is that you open
up this file and all you have to do is click the Executable,
you do not have to worry about any of the other files
that are in the folder.
What happens is that there are certain categories of data
that are associated with each image,
and these categories include the name of the file,
and the date it was taken, along with the time,
and other pertinent data, such as the filter that were used,
the XYZ position of the picture, the type of lighting,
which includes epi-, trans-, or LED,
and other such relevant data.
These were all things that were expressed to me,
by the various scientists, as information that they need
to know in order to obtain useful information
from any given image.
What you first do is open up LMMING,
and your first objective is to choose the Directory.
And when you choose the Directory, you have to make sure
that your raw data is downloaded to your local computer and not
on a flash drive or a CD, and tell LMMING where you want,
where the data is, where the raw data is that is on your computer
that you would like to see.
And then afterwards, what happens is
that there are progress dialogues that tells you
that LMMING's working to get you the data onto your screen
by decompressing raw images, decompressing raw files,
and then putting them all together so that you can see it
on the screen when it's all done.
On the left side, you will see the tree view
where it would contain all your samples, test runs, and images.
And then in the middle of LMMING, you have the table
where all your metadata is, which contains your name
and the time and date and all the pertinent data that's
relevant to the image, and then on the very right of LMMING,
you have the image itself, where you can actually see it
without having to open anything, without having
to touch anything, and the only interactions that the user has
to do is interact with the tree view that's on the left,
click a sample or a test run, or an image,
just to see it on the right.
The data tool will merge the time stamp data
and the sequential numbering with the metadata
from the microscope and provide a visual interface that's much
more intuitive, where the researcher, whether it's the PI
or the open source researcher can quickly scroll through,
or go through a large amount of data and get to the images
of interest very quickly.