Human brain atlasing: past, present and future

Abstract

We have recently witnessed an explosion of large-scale initiatives and projects addressing mapping, modeling, simulation and atlasing of the human brain, including the BRAIN Initiative, the Human Brain Project, the Human Connectome Project (HCP), the Big Brain, the Blue Brain Project, the Allen Brain Atlas, the Brainnetome, among others. Besides these large and international initiatives, there are numerous mid-size and small brain atlas-related projects. My contribution to these global efforts has been to create adult human brain atlases in health and disease, and to develop atlas-based applications. For over two decades with my R&D lab I developed 35 brain atlases, licensed to 67 companies and made available in about 100 countries. This paper has two objectives. First, it provides an overview of the state of the art in brain atlasing. Second, as it is already 20 years from the release of our first brain atlas, I summarise my past and present efforts, share my experience in atlas creation, validation and commercialisation, compare with the state of the art, and propose future directions.