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Abstract
<p class="first" id="d6664097e177">Human brain atlases provide spatial reference systems
for data characterizing brain
organization at different levels, coming from different brains. Cytoarchitecture is
a basic principle of the microstructural organization of the brain, as regional differences
in the arrangement and composition of neuronal cells are indicators of changes in
connectivity and function. Automated scanning procedures and observer-independent
methods are prerequisites to reliably identify cytoarchitectonic areas, and to achieve
reproducible models of brain segregation. Time becomes a key factor when moving from
the analysis of single regions of interest towards high-throughput scanning of large
series of whole-brain sections. Here we present a new workflow for mapping cytoarchitectonic
areas in large series of cell-body stained histological sections of human postmortem
brains. It is based on a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which is trained
on a pair of section images with annotations, with a large number of un-annotated
sections in between. The model learns to create all missing annotations in between
with high accuracy, and faster than our previous workflow based on observer-independent
mapping. The new workflow does not require preceding 3D-reconstruction of sections,
and is robust against histological artefacts. It processes large data sets with sizes
in the order of multiple Terabytes efficiently. The workflow was integrated into a
web interface, to allow access without expertise in deep learning and batch computing.
Applying deep neural networks for cytoarchitectonic mapping opens new perspectives
to enable high-resolution models of brain areas, introducing CNNs to identify borders
of brain areas.
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