VISUALIZATION, RECONSTRUCTION, AND INTEGRATION OF NEURONAL STRUCTURES IN DIGITAL BRAIN ATLASES

Abstract

Brain atlases are used in neuroanatomy to define the spatial layout of neuronal structures. Their digital variant can serve as a database and common reference frame for integrating data from different biological experiments. This article presents an overview of methods for three-dimensional visualization of neuroanatomical image data, reconstructing neuronal structures from image data, creating digital brain atlases, and registering data in an atlas. This enables analysis of spatial relations between individual structures imaged in different experiments as well as between these structures and the atlas.

Keywords:

• digital neuroanatomy
• population-based atlas
• segmentation
• standard brain
• surface reconstruction
• 3-D anatomical models

Notes

¹National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

²2University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) Genome Bioinformatics, http://genome.ucsc.edu.

³http://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/data_sharing.

⁴http://www.nimh.nih.gov/neuroinformatics

⁵International Consortium for Brain Mapping (ICBM), http://www.loni.ucla.edu/ICBM.

⁶http://big.sfn.org/NDG/site.

⁷Flybrain-An online atlas and database of the drosophila nervous system, http://www.flybrain.org.

⁸The Virtual Atlas of the Honeybee Brain, http://www.neurobiologie.fu-berlin.de/BeeBrain.

⁹Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN), http://www.nbirn.net.