The Scalable Brain Atlas: instant web-based access to public brain atlases and related content

TL;DR

The Scalable Brain Atlas offers instant web-based access to diverse brain atlas templates across species, enabling interactive exploration, coordinate transformations, and comparative analysis within a lightweight, unified platform.

Contribution

It introduces a web service platform that unifies access to multiple brain atlases with interactive tools for analysis and comparison, supporting diverse species and functionalities.

Findings

Contains 20 atlas templates across six species.

Supports plugins for coordinate transformations and connectivity display.

Provides a lightweight, unified web interface for brain atlas exploration.

Abstract

The Scalable Brain Atlas (SBA) is a collection of web services that provide unified access to a large collection of brain atlas templates for different species. Its main component is an atlas viewer that displays brain atlas data as a stack of slices in which stereotaxic coordinates and brain regions can be selected. These are subsequently used to launch web queries to resources that require coordinates or region names as input. It supports plugins which run inside the viewer and respond when a new slice, coordinate or region is selected. It contains 20 atlas templates in six species, and plugins to compute coordinate transformations, display anatomical connectivity and fiducial points, and retrieve properties, descriptions, definitions and 3d reconstructions of brain regions. The ambition of SBA is to provide a unified representation of all publicly available brain atlases directly in the web browser, while remaining a responsive and light weight resource that specializes in atlas comparisons, searches, coordinate transformations and interactive displays.