Vaa3D [1, 2, 3] is a handy, fast, and versatile 3D/4D/5D Image Visualization & Analysis System for Bioimages & Surface Objects. It also provides many unique functions ... It is also Open Source, supports a very simple and powerful plugin interface and thus can be extended & enhanced easily...

        Vaa3D is a cross-platform (Mac, Linux, and Windows) tool for visualizing large-scale (gigabytes, and 64-bit data) 3D image stacks and various surface data. It is also a container of powerful modules for 3D image analysis (cell segmentation, neuron tracing, brain registration, annotation, quantitative measurement and statistics, etc) and data management. This makes Vaa3D suitable for various bioimage informatics applications, and a nice platform to develop new 3D image analysis algorithms for high-throughput processing. In short, Vaa3D streamlines the workflow of visualization-assisted analysis.

        In our latest development, Vaa3D can render 5D (spatial-temporal) data directly in 3D volume-rendering mode; it supports convenient and interactive local and global 3D views at different scales... it even has a Matlab file IO toolbox. Probably most importantly, you can now write your own plugins to take advantage of the Vaa3D platform!

        Please contact us if you want to learn more, provide feedbacks, or become a part of this exciting developing team!

1. 1.What Vaa3D means? It is the short-term for “3D Visualization-Assisted Analysis”, a term used in our 2010 Nature Biotechnology paper.
   

2. 2.Vaa3D is the new name of the popular 3D+ visualization software suite developed in Hanchuan Peng lab. It also has a new Chinese name now: ‘挖三维’, which means ‘Mining in 3D’, the intended use of this program. The pronunciation of the Chinese name is similar to  ‘Wa-San-Wei’.
   

3. 3.This program was formerly referred to as 'V3D', which confuses with other ‘V3D’ names on Internet. Thus since Nov 7, 2011, this program changed to the new names of ‘Vaa3D’ and ‘挖三维’.