We’ve seen beautiful detailed anatomy of a piece of mouse cerebral cortex (see my blog post “The Connectome: Video Journey Through Brain Microcircuitry“) but until now there has not been an automated approach to reconstructing the whole brain at high resolution.
Last week (November 4, 2010) the paper “Micro-Optical Sectioning Tomography to Obtain a High-Resolution Atlas of the Mouse Brain” was published online in Science. It describes an automated system that collects high resolution, three dimensional whole brain anatomy.
Their system, which they term Micro-Optical Sectioning Tomography, collected whole mouse brain data continuously for 242 hours (for more than 10 days). It cut the brain into 15,380 sections and imaged them. The result was more than 8 terabytes of uncompressed data.
Be sure to check out the videos in their supplemental materials, especially Movie s4 and Movie s5.
Other related blog posts:
Mapping the Brain’s Connections: the Connectome
The Connectome: Automated Submicron Reconstruction of Brain Circuitry