EBRAINS presents Brain Atlases at INCF Assembly 2022

The INCF Assembly is a unique venue where neuroscience standards developers, infrastructure providers, and software developers have the opportunity to interact with the research community to share the latest advancements in neuroinformatics.

On 14 September, EBRAINS Special Advisor for Neuroinformatics Jan Bjaalie and Maja Puchades co-chaired the workshop 'Automatic spatial quantification of brain data from small animal models.’ The workshop presented and compared a series of neuroinformatics tools for performing feature extraction and advanced brain-wide distribution analysis in an atlas context. Attendees were guided through use cases demonstrating how the tools can be used for different purposes. "One of the main challenges in neuroscience is the diversity of data, and the many different scales used to measure it," said Puchades. "Atlasing can help."

The next day on 15 September, EBRAINS postdoc and data curation scientist Ingvild E. Bjerke and Trygve Brauns Leergaard presented ‘Neuroscience data integration through use of digital brain atlases.’ The course contained an introduction to currently available reference atlases for the mouse and rat brain such as the EBRAINS Mouse Brain Atlas and Rat Brain Atlas. It demonstrated how the 3D brain templates for the reference atlases are acquired and how they can be used as a basis for assigning location to a wide range of structural and functional data collected from the brain. Bjerke was recently awarded the King's Gold Medal for her PhD thesis which demonstrated 3D atlases which are available on EBRAINS.