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The brain is the most complex and significant organ, but little is known regarding to the mechanisms of its function, which is related to brain anatomy. Conventional anatomical methods based on brain slices fail to reconstruct the neural projection in axial direction at single-cell resolution. To solve the problem, my lab has spent more than ten years developing Brain-wide Positioning System (BPS), a novel solution combining microscopic optical imaging and physical sectioning to obtain the tomographic information of a whole brain with sub-micron voxel resolution. BPS includes several generations such as Micro-Optical Sectioning Tomography (MOST) and several types of fluorescence MOST (fMOST). In this talk, I will introduce the principles of BPS and demonstrate how to locate and visualize the labelled neurons and neuronal networks in the whole brain. The pipeline includes whole-brain sample preparation, whole-brain optical imaging, and massive brain image processing and analyzation. BPS may play a crucial role and usher in a new era of Brainsmatics. Brainsmatics refers to the integrated, systematic approaches of measuring, analyzing, managing, and displaying brain spatial data, including but not limited to the concepts of digital mapping and visualization of the brain neuronal/vascular networks, brain atlas, brain connectome and projectome, brainnetome, neuroinformatics, and neuroimaging. Brainsmatics will provide comprehensive and systematic information to understand the brain, defeat the brain disease, and develop the brain-inspired intelligence.
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