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@INPROCEEDINGS{Mohlberg:1018405,
author = {Mohlberg, Hartmut and Lepage, Y. Claude and Toussaint,
Paule-J. and Wenzel, Susanne and Evans, Alan C. and Amunts,
Katrin},
title = {3{D} reconstruction of {B}ig{B}rain2: {P}rogress report on
updated processing pipeline and application to existing
annotations and cortical surfaces},
reportid = {FZJ-2023-04786},
year = {2023},
abstract = {The development of BigBrain2 is a continuation of the first
BigBrain [1] that will contribute new insight on
inter-subject cytoarchitectonic variability. Overall,
BigBrain2 offers better quality staining, favorable to
regional segmentation and registration, and contains fewer
artefacts through sectioning and staining. In this
presentation, we will report about the initial 3D
reconstruction of BigBrain2 at 100µm, which is suitable
already for the extraction of cortical surfaces and the
representation of annotations of some cortical and
subcortical regions.The paraffin embedded fixed brain of a
30-year-old male donor was sectioned coronally at 20µm
thickness using a large-scale microtome. All 7676 sections
were stained for cell bodies (Merker stain), then scanned at
10µm in-plane (flatbed scanner, 8bit grey level encoding)
and subsequently at 1µm in-plane (Huron TissueScope
scanner). The histological flatbed scanner sections were
resampled at 20µm in-plane, to match the section thickness,
and manual and semi-automatic corrections were performed to
repair acquisition artifacts due to sectioning and
histological preparation (tears, folds, missing tissue,
excessive distortion etc.) [2]. Every fifth section was
initially repaired, with comprehensive quality control (QC),
from which a first 3D reconstruction was obtained at an
effective section spacing of 100µm. Data provenance
tracking of all repair operations provides a means for
assessing the extents of the repaired artifacts and for
eventual reproducibility at the 1µm in-plane resolution.
The repaired sections were aligned to the post-mortem MRI of
the fixed brain (Siemens Sonata, 1.5T, MPRAGE, 0.5mm) in an
iterative process by 3D registration of the stacked images
to the MRI, followed by 2D registration of the individual
images to the sliced MRI, while gradually increasing the
degree of 2D and 3D registration from rigid-body to affine
to non-linear across 10 global iterations. These extra
global iterations helped resolve the lower-frequency
alignment errors causing jaggies. Alignment to the MRI
enables to correct for tissue compression caused by cutting
and mounting of sections, and tissue shrinkage. Ultimately,
section-to-section non-linear 2D alignment (without MRI) was
performed to resolve high-frequency alignment errors.
Optical-balancing was applied by normalizing image
intensities to the MRI data to correct for staining
imbalances across the brain. The reconstructed 3D volume is
obtained at 100µm in the MRI ex-vivo space, which is
suitable for the extraction of cortical surfaces. Finally,
computed transformations are saved and can be applied to
regions annotated on the original sections.Ongoing work
includes the semi-automatic repairs of the remaining
sections $(80\%)$ to obtain a complete volume at 20µm
isotropic resolution onto which sections at the cellular
resolution of 1µm can be progressively
overlaid.References:[1] Amunts K. et al., BigBrain: An
Ultrahigh-Resolution 3D Human Brain Model. Science, 2013.[2]
Mohlberg H. et al., 3D reconstruction of BigBrain2:
Challenges, methods, and status of histological section
repair – A progress report. BigBrain Workshop 2022},
month = {Oct},
date = {2023-10-04},
organization = {7th BigBrain Workshop, Reykjavík
(Iceland), 4 Oct 2023 - 6 Oct 2023},
subtyp = {After Call},
cin = {INM-1},
cid = {I:(DE-Juel1)INM-1-20090406},
pnm = {5251 - Multilevel Brain Organization and Variability
(POF4-525) / 5254 - Neuroscientific Data Analytics and AI
(POF4-525) / HIBALL - Helmholtz International BigBrain
Analytics and Learning Laboratory (HIBALL) (InterLabs-0015)},
pid = {G:(DE-HGF)POF4-5251 / G:(DE-HGF)POF4-5254 /
G:(DE-HGF)InterLabs-0015},
typ = {PUB:(DE-HGF)6},
url = {https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1018405},
}