BrainMaps is an

NIH The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

-funded interactive zoomable high-resolution digital

brain atlas A brain atlas is composed of serial sections along different anatomical planes of the healthy or diseased developing or adult animal or human brain where each relevant brain structure is assigned a number of coordinates to define its outline or vol ...

and virtual microscope that is based on more than 140 million megapixels (140 terabytes) of scanned images of serial sections of both primate and non-primate

brain A brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It is located in the head, usually close to the sensory organs for senses such as vision. It is the most complex organ in a v ...

s and that is integrated with a high-speed

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...

for querying and retrieving data about brain structure and function over the internet. Currently featured are complete brain atlas datasets for 16 species; a few of which are: ''

Macaca mulatta The rhesus macaque (''Macaca mulatta''), colloquially rhesus monkey, is a species of Old World monkey. There are between six and nine recognised subspecies that are split between two groups, the Chinese-derived and the Indian-derived. Generally b ...

'', '' Chlorocebus aethiops'', ''

Felis silvestris catus The cat (''Felis catus'') is a domestic species of small carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticated species in the family Felidae and is commonly referred to as the domestic cat or house cat to distinguish it from the wild members o ...

'', ''

Mus musculus Mus or MUS may refer to: Abbreviations * MUS, the NATO country code for Mauritius * MUS, the IATA airport code for Minami Torishima Airport * MUS, abbreviation for the Centre for Modern Urban Studies on Campus The Hague, Leiden University, Neth ...

'', ''

Rattus norvegicus ''Rattus'' is a genus of muroid rodents, all typically called rats. However, the term rat can also be applied to rodent species outside of this genus. Species and description The best-known ''Rattus'' species are the black rat (''R. rattus'') ...

'', and ''

Tyto alba The barn owl (''Tyto alba'') is the most widely distributed species of owl in the world and one of the most widespread of all species of birds, being found almost everywhere except for the polar and desert regions, Asia north of the Himalay ...

''. The project's

principal investigator In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial. The phrase is also often us ...

was

UC Davis The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a public land-grant research university near Davis, California. Named a Public Ivy, it is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The institut ...

neuroscientist Ted Jones from 2005 through 2011, after which the role was taken by W. Martin Usrey.

Description

BrainMaps uses multiresolution image formats for representing massive brain images, and a dHTML/Javascript front-end user interface for image navigation, both similar to the way that

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...

works for geospatial data. BrainMaps is one of the most massive online neuroscience databases and image repositories and features the highest-resolution whole brain atlas ever constructed. Extensions to interactive 3-dimensional visualization have been developed through

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

-based desktop applications. Freely available image analysis tools enable end-users to datamine online images at the sub-neuronal level. BrainMaps has been used in both research an
didactic
settings.

Additional images

Image:Brainmaps3.jpg, Massive brain images are formatted as multiresolution image pyramids, enabling rapid navigation by loading small image tiles instead of the entire image. Image:Brainmaps4.jpg, Datasets as a function of species at BrainMaps.

References

External links

{{Commons category, BrainMaps
BrainMaps.org

BrainMaps featured in ''Science'' Magazine

BrainMaps images featured in ''Discover'' Magazine article, "10 Unsolved Mysteries Of The Brain"

BrainMaps-related Publications
Online databases Anatomy websites Biological databases

Description

Additional images

See also

References

External links