This project will enable researchers to map data from studies of the macaque brain over the Web into a fully segmented, high-resolution, spatially indexed, 3-dimensional brain atlas built on basic informatics and neuroanatomic principles. Investigators will be able to visualize and quantify the overlap between areas in which specific genes are expressed, areas of activation revealed by brain imaging (functional MRI or PET scan), classical brain structures and other experimental data, such as, areas containing particular kinds of nerve cells, and areas with connections to certain other brain structures. Noninvasive imaging technologies now allow scientists to scan the whole brain for focal areas of activity associated with specific psychological phenomena. Similarly, modern genomics allows rapid screening of the whole brain for focal areas of gene expression. Such techniques hold great promise for analyzing structure-function relationships in the brain, but they do not reveal the anatomical boundaries of cortical areas well enough for researchers to precisely identify the anatomical locations of activation or genetic involvement. This project will allow researchers to generate template cross-sections of the brain at any angle and position from a 3D digital atlas, modify them to match individual variation, and overlay them on experimental histologic, MRI or PET sections to show the approximate boundaries of structures not visible by those techniques. The informatics component of the project will merge landmark boundaries identified by MRI, block face photos and histological photomicrographs to produce a digital 3-dimensional template atlas of the entire rhesus (Macaca mulatta) brain. The 3D model will reside in the BrainInfo website at the National Primate Research Center at the University of Washington. Researchers at other institutions will be able to map a variety of kinds of data into the atlas over the Web for comparison with data mapped by others. The maps, as well as many other kinds of brain information, will thus be shared with the entire neuroscientific community. 2) The research component of the project will be to map in the nonhuman primate brain the expression of genes that have been implicated in certain human psychiatric disorders. This project will accelerate the communication of new research findings among neuroscientists the world over and will improve our understanding of areas of the brain involved in such disorders as autism and schizophrenia.
| Bowden, Douglas M; Song, Evan; Kosheleva, Julia et al. (2012) NeuroNames: an ontology for the BrainInfo portal to neuroscience on the web. Neuroinformatics 10:97-114 |
| Bowden, Douglas M; Johnson, G Allan; Zaborsky, Laszlo et al. (2011) A symmetrical Waxholm canonical mouse brain for NeuroMaps. J Neurosci Methods 195:170-5 |
| Petersen, R C; Aisen, P S; Beckett, L A et al. (2010) Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI): clinical characterization. Neurology 74:201-9 |
| Bowden, Douglas M; Dubach, Mark; Park, Jack (2007) Creating neuroscience ontologies. Methods Mol Biol 401:67-87 |
| Annese, J; Sforza, D M; Dubach, M et al. (2006) Postmortem high-resolution 3-dimensional imaging of the primate brain: blockface imaging of perfusion stained tissue. Neuroimage 30:61-9 |
