Large-scale Image Processing and Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of Mouse Brains with Neurogenic-Tagged Neurons.

The NeuroGT (neurogenic tagging) database provides images of whole-brain sections of mice in which neurons that differentiated at a similar time have been genetically tagged. The images of brain sections are displayed in order from the anterior to the posterior end on a web-browser, and the regions containing tagged neurons can be visually confirmed. However, it has been difficult to grasp their location in three-dimensional (3D) space. As a first step toward quantitative analysis of neuronal location, we automatically detected regions of mouse brains containing tagged neurons by using image processing and integrated that information into 3D space. We confirmed that the proposed methods detected brain regions with an average precision of 88% and average recall of 99%. We achieved visualization of 3D reconstructed brain shapes and distribution of tagged neurons in the regions of the brain.