neuroanatomy
applied & theoretical
The Brain Catalogue

Help us segment the cerebral cortex of a Bottle Nose Dolphin

Feature
Open Science Prize

Our project Open Neuroimaging Laboratory was 1 of the 6 selected for Phase 1 of the Open Science Prize, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, the NIH, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We presented a project in collaboration with Amy Robinson from EyeWire, Katja Heuer from the Max Planck Institute and Satrajit Ghosh from MIT.

We proposed to develop a collaborative environment that would allow anyone with a web browser to analyse MRI data available anywhere online: Amazon, Figshare, DropBox, Zenodo, GitHub, etc. We presented a prototype of our web app BrainBox for collaborative segmentation.

Each of the 6 selected projects received 80kUSD to develop their project. The projects will be demonstrated next December, when one of them will pass to Phase 2: 230k USD to complete the winning project.

You can read more about the Open Neuroimaging Laboratory project here, here and here (our complete application is published in the RIO journal), and about the Open Science Prize and the 6 selected projects here, here or here.

BrainHack@Paris

Last February our group hosted the interdisciplinary workshop BrainHack at the Institut Pasteur. We were close to 80 researchers, clinicians and artists working 24h/24 on different projects related to neuroscience.

We had the opportunity to explore the sonification of real-time EEG data, to work together on the segmentation of the brains from our Brain Catalogue, and we had tutorials on brain tractography, functional parcellation of the brain and genomics.

We used Slack to initiate and coordinate our projects, many of which are still under active development.

The Brain Catalogue: An open portal for comparative neuroanatomy research

The Brain Catalogue is a project to create an open-access catalogue of high-quality vertebrate brain MRI.

We are currently scanning and processing the collection of vertebrate brains from the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris, and building online tools to visualise and analyse the data, collaboratively.

Highlights

• Our project FIIND was accepted by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche in France and the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, which will allow us to create an online atlas of the development of the ferret brain, and to further the development of MicroDraw

• Slides from the presentation of our research at the Laboratory of Computational Neuroanatomy, Massachussets General Hospital in Boston are available here

• And if the physical forces of brain folding played a causal role in neocortical organisation? Our article on mechanical morphogenesis of the brain is up on bioRxiv waiting for your comments!. Visit the articles's website here to play with the interactive simulations.

• Our article on the neuroanatomical diversity of brain volume and corpus callosum is online in Biol Psychiatry. Visit the articles's website here, with our collaborative Quality Control web app, and iPython scripts for the statistical simulations.

• Manual addition of articles to BrainSpell.

• New collaborative segmentation: Black Rhinoceros.

• Our article on the Genomic architecture of human neuroanatomical diversity is online in at Mol Psychiatry.

Upcoming

24-26 February 2016: We will host the workshop BrainHack.

29 June 2015: Presentation of a review of our research @ Neurospin.

14 June 2015: Neuroimaging genetics course @ OHBM in Hawaii, organised by Jason Stein and JB Poline.

25 March 2015: Genomic architecture of Neuroanatomical diversity @ Recherche en Imagerie et Technologies pour la Santé, organised by French Society of Biomedical Engineering.

26 March 2015: Open Neuroscience @ So Data, organised by the Institut des Systèmes Complexes and HackYourPhD.

1 April 2015: Katja Heuer and Roberto @ BigBrain in Jülich, presenting Microdraw.

13 April 2015: We are going to the annual EU-AIMS meeting with GHFC.