Preventing neuronal damage and inflammation in vivo during cortical microelectrode implantation through the use of poloxamer P-188.

Objective: The aim of this study was to test the efficacy of Poloxamer P188 to reduce cell death and immune response associated with mechanical trauma to cells during implantation of a chronic recording electrode.

Approach: Ceramic multi-site recording electrodes were implanted bilaterally into 15 adult male Long-Evans rats. One of each pair was randomly assigned to receive a coating of Poloxamer while the other was treated with saline.

Waxholm space: an image-based reference for coordinating mouse brain research.

We describe an atlas of the C57BL/6 mouse brain based on MRI and conventional Nissl histology. Magnetic resonance microscopy was performed on a total of 14 specimens that were actively stained to enhance tissue contrast. Images were acquired with three different MR protocols yielding contrast dependent on spin lattice relaxation (T1), spin spin relaxation (T2), and magnetic susceptibility (T2*).

The Neuroterrain 3D Mouse Brain Atlas.

A significant objective of neuroinformatics is the construction of tools to readily access, search, and analyze anatomical imagery. This goal can be subdivided into development of the necessary databases and of the computer vision tools for image analysis. When considering mesoscale images, the latter tools can be further divided into registration algorithms and anatomical models.

Contour-Based Surface Reconstruction using MPU Implicit Models.

This paper presents a technique for creating a smooth, closed surface from a set of 2D contours, which have been extracted from a 3D scan. The technique interprets the pixels that make up the contours as points in ℝ(3) and employs Multi-level Partition of Unity (MPU) implicit models to create a surface that approximately fits to the 3D points. Since MPU implicit models additionally require surface normal information at each point, an algorithm that estimates normals from the contour data is also described.