Efforts of Brain Mapping at ANL; Towards Multiresolution Maps of Whole Mouse Brains

Rafael Vescovi
Seminar

From the first optical microscopes to today’s high-throughput electron microscopes, every new technical improvement in imaging has led to outstanding biological discoveries. We now have the tools to take on a previously unimaginable challenge in system’s neuroscience: mapping the brain’s wiring diagram. Brain mapping currently occurs at widely disparate resolutions and volumes: from nanometer-resolution of brain sub-regions with electron microscopy (EM) to millimeter-resolution maps of whole brains with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Here I present our achievements on x-ray micro tomography of a whole mouse brain obtained with the tomosaic package and discuss our effort to turn this technique into a translational bridge: a rosetta stone between MRI and EM. Lastly, I will discuss our current efforts to integrate these three techniques into a single pipeline that uses HPC to minimize human interaction. This standardized semi-automated pipeline will handle petabyte/month data throughput and will be accessible to a large number of users.