Cell Feature Explorer
The Cell Feature Explorer makes a database of over 200,000 segmented human iPS cells interactively accessible — letting researchers filter, visualize, and compare cells by any measured structural feature.
The Allen Institute's cell database is one of the largest of its kind: hundreds of thousands of cells, each segmented in 3D and measured across dozens of structural features. The challenge was making that richness legible without drowning the researcher in options. I designed the interactive scatter plots, 3D cell viewers, and filtering controls that let researchers explore the full dataset. A key design decision was linking the 2D statistical plots directly to 3D cell renderings — select a cluster of outliers in the scatter plot and the corresponding cells light up in 3D.
Good tools let the data ask questions back.
The Cell Feature Explorer underpinned the 2023 Nature paper "Integrated intracellular organization and its variations in human iPS cells" — a new mathematical framework for understanding cellular building blocks derived from that 200,000-cell database.