Abstract

Despite orders of magnitude gains in computing power capability and data storage capacity over the last decade, our understanding of the human brain remains limited. Multidisciplinary efforts starting from high resolution anatomic and functional imagery at the cellular level to genomic level inquiry via a combination of systems neuroscience, electrophysiology and molecular biology hold promise towards unraveling secrets of the human brain. Such a multi-scale analysis of the brain anatomy presents unique computational challenges to the biomedical community. At the Allen Institute, we successfully completed a genome-wide anatomical mouse brain atlas with cellular resolution (http://www.brain-map.org). In this talk, I will present our approach based on a large scale high throughput image/data analysis pipeline. Moving forward, the computational challenges lie ahead in mapping the human brain, an organ 1000 times larger than the mouse brain, will be presented to further the discussion on computational challenges to biomedical imaging .