What is it like to be a Giant anteater? Cytoarchitectonic analysis of open data with MicroDraw.

Brain histology provides unique information on the cellular structure of the brain. Histological data has been collected for more than a century, and is available for a wide variety of species and developmental stages. This type of data is, however, challenging to visualise, analyse and share. Here we present the current state of our Web tool MicroDraw, which aims at addressing these challenges through virtual distributed collaboration. We describe a complete analysis of the cytoarchitecture of a giant anteater brain, from data preprocessing to the representation of a quantitative cytoarchitectonic parcellation. Our results show that MicroDraw can be used to analyse high-resolution histological data, enabling distributed collaboration to improve our understanding of the cellular structure of the brain. The work has been presented at the Fourth BigBrain Workshop: Launch of the Helmholtz International BigBrain Analytics and Learning Laboratory (HIBALL) – a OHBM satellite event, June 26 2020