Group-wise 3D registration based templates to study the evolution of ant worker neuroanatomy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel group-wise 3D registration method to create unbiased brain atlases of ant workers, enabling automated segmentation and comparative neuroanatomy studies across species and castes.

Contribution

The study presents the first bias-free brain atlases for ant workers using group-wise registration, facilitating automated analysis of neuroanatomical differences.

Findings

Developed a group-wise 3D registration approach

Created unbiased brain atlases for ant workers

Enabled automated segmentation of new samples

Abstract

The evolutionary success of ants and other social insects is considered to be intrinsically linked to division of labor and emergent collective intelligence. The role of the brains of individual ants in generating these processes, however, is poorly understood. One genus of ant of special interest is Pheidole, which includes more than a thousand species, most of which are dimorphic, i.e. their colonies contain two subcastes of workers: minors and majors. Using confocal imaging and manual annotations, it has been demonstrated that minor and major workers of different ages of three species of Pheidole have distinct patterns of brain size and subregion scaling. However, these studies require laborious effort to quantify brain region volumes and are subject to potential bias. To address these issues, we propose a group-wise 3D registration approach to build for the first time bias-free brain atlases of intra- and inter-subcaste individuals and automatize the segmentation of new individuals.