Toward Morphologic Atlasing of the Human Whole Brain at the Nanoscale

Abstract

Although no dataset at the nanoscale for the entire human brain has yet been acquired and neither a nanoscale human whole brain atlas has been constructed, tremendous progress in neuroimaging and high-performance computing makes them feasible in the non-distant future. To construct the human whole brain nanoscale atlas, there are several challenges, and here, we address two, i.e., the morphology modeling of the brain at the nanoscale and designing of a nanoscale brain atlas. A new nanoscale neuronal format is introduced to describe data necessary and sufficient to model the entire human brain at the nanoscale, enabling calculations of the synaptome and connectome. The design of the nanoscale brain atlas covers design principles, content, architecture, navigation, functionality, and user interface. Three novel design principles are introduced supporting navigation, exploration, and calculations, namely, a gross neuroanatomy-guided navigation of micro/nanoscale neuroanatomy; a movable and zoomable sampling volume of interest for navigation and exploration; and a nanoscale data processing in a parallel-pipeline mode exploiting parallelism resulting from the decomposition of gross neuroanatomy parcellated into structures and regions as well as nano neuroanatomy decomposed into neurons and synapses, enabling the distributed construction and continual enhancement of the nanoscale atlas. Numerous applications of this atlas can be contemplated ranging from proofreading and continual multi-site extension to exploration, morphometric and network-related analyses, and knowledge discovery. To my best knowledge, this is the first proposed neuronal morphology nanoscale model and the first attempt to design a human whole brain atlas at the nanoscale.