Instructions

VAST (Volume Annotation and Segmentation Tool) is a utility application for manual annotation of large EM stacks.

The VAST Lite executable and other files on this page are provided free of charge and may be distributed freely, but not sold. Commercial usage is allowed. For more information please see the VAST Lite manual.

• Requirements: 64-bit Windows 7, 8, or 10, with DirectX 11
• Installation: No installation required. Simply unzip the executable program, copy it into a folder where you have read/write access and start it.
• Set up links on your desktop, start menu and/or taskbar if desired. It is important that VAST has write access to the folder where the executable is, because it will write a configuration file (vast_preferences.dat) into the same folder to store your settings.

The executable contains a supplementary files package which it can write to disk. The package includes a documentation PDF, the VastTools Matlab scripts for extended functionality, and .vsvr files which provide immediate access to some large online data sets.

You can find a series of tutorials for VAST Lite on Youtube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaCh7xETLzU&list=PL6sVkt65AxrR3TBdWKdjoaLf0gCGKT-tq

VAST has been published in this paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncir.2018.00088/full

Download VAST Lite

New Key Features (over Version 1.4.1):

• Support for up to four main window panels
• New Node Tool (Annotation Objects menu / 'Node Tool') which lets you select specific nodes and perform different actions using just those nodes
• New raymarching 3D viewer (work in progress)
• Segmentations can be generated from tool layers by filling at skeleton nodes added (Segment Colors menu / 'Add Segments From Other Layers ...')
• VSVI data can now be cached on the local disk

VAST Lite Version 1.5.0 (May 9th, 2024) - To receive a download link, please click here and submit this form.
- Reason: Funding sources for the development of VAST have asked us to provide usage statistics. Since VAST does not collect any usage data, we would like to at least keep track of who downloads it from us.

Here is the supplementary package for VAST Lite Version 1.5.0 as ZIP (also included within the executable file)

Here is the manual for VAST Lite Version 1.5.0 as PDF (also included within the executable file and the supplementary package)

Release Notes for Vast Lite Version 1.5.0

Click here to download VAST Lite Version 1.4.1 (June 2nd, 2022)

Here is the manual for VAST Lite Version 1.4.1 as PDF (also included within the executable file)

Release Notes for Vast Lite Version 1.4.1

Download Kasthuri2015 Data for VAST