Abstract
The stereotaxic brain atlas is a fundamental reference tool commonly used in the field of neuroscience. Here we provide a brief history of brain atlas development and clarify three key conceptual elements of stereotaxic brain atlasing: brain image, atlas, and stereotaxis. We also refine four technical indices for evaluating the construction of atlases: the quality of staining and labeling, the granularity of delineation, spatial resolution, and the precision of spatial location and orientation. Additionally, we discuss state-of-the-art technologies and their trends in the fields of image acquisition, stereotaxic coordinate construction, image processing, anatomical structure recognition, and publishing: the procedures of brain atlas illustration. We believe that the use of single-cell resolution and micron-level location precision will become a future trend in the study of the stereotaxic brain atlas, which will greatly benefit the development of neuroscience.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61721092, 81827901, 61890950, and 61890951). We appreciate the MOST group members of Britton Chance Centre for Biomedical Photonics for assistance with literature collection and comments on the manuscript.
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Feng, Z., Li, A., Gong, H. et al. Constructing the rodent stereotaxic brain atlas: a survey. Sci. China Life Sci. 65, 93–106 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-020-1911-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-020-1911-9