Abstract
Mammalian brains are extremely complex: a mouse brain contains one hundred million neurons. Mapping an entire brain’s three-dimensional cytoarchitecture from the nano- to centimeter-scale is a monumental challenge. For standard microtomography with sub-µm pixel size, reconstructed volume is limited to about a few mm3 . For full brain mapping, even for the mouse brain with volume of 450 mm3 , the field-of-view must be significantly increased in all three dimensions. We demonstrate mosaic tiling to extend imaged volume by 400× and a dedicated pipeline to process these tera-voxel sized datasets. Here, an entire mouse brain was imaged with 0.65 µm-wide voxels. The datasets, which are 6 TB in size at 16-bit depth, contain a wealth of microanatomical information but present challenges for registration and segmentation.
Rodgers, Griffin