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

Your browser or your operating system may attempt to prevent you from downloading the files below. Under Windows 10, you may have to click 'More info' and 'Run anyway' to start the Vast Lite executable.

Newest Version: Vast Lite 1.4.1

New Key Features (over Version 1.4.0):

New 'Tool Layers' support 'Chunked Region Collector' for agglomeration of automatic segmentations with skeletons
Support for loading datasets from new online sources: Multitile images and Neuroglancer formats, supporting data stored in Google Cloud Storage and Amazon Web Services

VAST Lite Version 1.4.1 (June 2nd, 2022) - 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 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

Previous Version: Vast Lite 1.4.0

Click here to download VAST Lite Version 1.4.0 (March 4th, 2021)

Here is the manual for VAST Lite Version 1.4.0 as PDF (also included within the executable file)

Release Notes for Vast Lite Version 1.4.0

Download Kasthuri2015 Data for VAST

Kasthuri15_Harvard.vsvr - VAST remote volume file to access the Kasthuri et al. (2015) high-resolution data set stored at Harvard (also included in the VAST executable). To download, right-click and choose "Save link as ...". If VAST gives you server error messages when using this file simply select 'No' in the pop-up window.

Thousands_6nm_spec_lossless.vsv - Full VAST EM volume of the Kasthuri et al. (2015) high-resolution data as a single 138 GB (!) file. DOWNLOAD NOT RECOMMENDED. Please use Kasthuri15_Harvard.vsvr (above) instead to access the same data remotely from our server

Kasthuri2015_RGCylinders_vsv.zip - VAST volume file containing the outlines of the two fully manually reconstructed cylinders

Kasthuri2015_Segmentation_vss.zip - VAST segmentation file containing the merged tracings of the two cylinders which were fully manually reconstructed in VAST and the cube which was partially reconstructed using semiautomated segmentation (Rhoana/Mojo)

AC3AC4Package.zip - Package of different AC3 and AC4 EM and segmentation stacks from the Kasthuri 2015 Cell paper

kasthuri2015_mmc6.xls - Updated version of the synapse matrix from the Kasthuri 2015 Cell paper (May 26, 2016)

Thousands_Mitochondria_db11.zip - VAST segmentation file containing segmented mitochondria from the Kasthuri 2015 Cell paper

kasthuri15_rawobj.zip - Exported .OBJ files for the neurite segmentation above (mip level 2, objects collapsed)

kasthuri15_vesicles.zip - Vesicle tracings from the Kasthuri 2015 Cell paper (VAST segmentation file)

For questions and comments, please contact me at: danielberger at fas.harvard.edu