Knowledge Base

Problem

When viewing heatmaps for individual time bins in EthoVision XT, the color scale on the side of each heatmap differs between bins even when switching between Mean and Cumulative views. Users want a consistent, shared color scale across all time bins for valid visual comparison.

Details

Each heatmap in EthoVision XT is automatically scaled to its own data range by default. This means that the same color intensity can represent different values in different time-bin heatmaps, making direct visual comparison unreliable. Affects all EthoVision XT versions that support heatmap output and time-bin analysis.

Solution

1. EthoVision XT does not provide a direct per-heatmap option to lock the color scale to a global range when viewing individual time-bin heatmaps.
2. To share a scale across bins, configure your Data Profile to group all time bins together into a single combined output rather than generating separate per-bin heatmaps. This allows EthoVision to calculate a common scale across the grouped data.
3. Alternatively, export the underlying raw or statistics data and generate heatmaps externally (e.g., in Python, R, or MATLAB) where you can manually fix the color scale across all bins.
4. If you must use EthoVision's built-in heatmaps, note the maximum value from the most active bin and treat that as your reference when interpreting other bins.