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Many insects use the pattern of polarized light in the sky for spatial orientation and navigation. We have investigated the polarization vision system in the desert locust. To create a common platform for anatomical studies on polarization vision pathways, Kurylas et al. (2008) have generated a three-dimensional (3D) standard brain from confocal microscopy image stacks of 10 male brains, using two different standardization methods, the Iterative Shape Averaging (ISA) procedure and the Virtual Insect Brain (VIB) protocol. Comparison of both standardization methods showed that the VIB standard is ideal for comparative volume analysis of neuropils, whereas the ISA standard is the method of choice to analyze the morphology and connectivity of neurons. The central complex is a key processing stage for polarization information in the locust brain. To investigate neuronal connections between diverse central-complex neurons, we generated a higher-resolution standard atlas of the central complex and surrounding areas, using the ISA method based on brain sections from 20 individual central complexes. To explore the usefulness of this atlas, two central-complex neurons, a polarization-sensitive columnar neuron (type CPU1a) and a tangential neuron that is activated during flight, the giant fan-shaped (GFS) neuron, were reconstructed 3D from brain sections. To examine whether the GFS neuron is a candidate to contribute to synaptic input to the CPU1a neuron, we registered both neurons into the standardized central complex. Visualization of both neurons revealed a potential connection of the CPU1a and GFS neurons in layer II of the upper division of the central body.
Pubmed ID: 20161763
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A software toolkit for computational morphometry of biomedical images, CMTK comprises a set of command line tools and a back-end general-purpose library for processing and I/O. The command line tools primarily provide the following functionality: registration (affine and nonrigid; single and multi-channel; pairwise and groupwise), image correction (MR bias field estimation; interleaved image artifact correction; EPI unwarping), processing (filters; combination of segmentations via voting and STAPLE; shape-based averaging), statistics (t-tests; general linear model). CMTK is implemented in C++ with parallel processing using POSIX Threads (SMP), OpenMP (SMP), Grand Central Dispatch (SMP), and CUDA (GPU). Supported file formats include Analyze (r/w), NIFTI (r/w), Nrrd (r/w), DICOM (read), BioRad (read). Data exchange with other toolkits, such as ITK, FSL, AFNI, SPM, etc. is thus easily accomplished.
View all literature mentionsSoftware repository for comparing structural (MRI) and functional neuroimaging (fMRI, PET, EEG, MEG) software tools and resources. NITRC collects and points to standardized information about structural or functional neuroimaging tool or resource.
View all literature mentionsSoftware tool for visualizing, manipulating, and understanding data from tomography, microscopy, MRI and other imaging processes.Used to import and export options, to processes 3D image filtering and DTI based fiber tracking to visualization, volume and surface rendering, author tools for virtual reality navigation, video generation, and more.
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