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Creating the next generation of highly detailed human brain models by building on the BigBrain - the first openly accessible, microscopic resolution 3D model of the human brain.

News About the BigBrain

Featured: voluba
date: June 1 2023
A common problem in high-resolution brain atlasing is spatial anchoring of volumes of interest from imaging experiments into the anatomical context of an ultrahigh-resolution reference model like BigBrain.
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Architecture and connectivity of the human angular gyrus and of its homolog region in the macaque brain
date: April 2023
The angular gyrus (AG) is a horseshoe-shaped region of the posterior inferior parietal lobe in the human brain. It has attracted major interest since it’s a higher-order associative cortical region that plays a prominent role in the integration of multiple sensory systems.
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HIBALL Year Three
date: Mar 31 2022
Celebrating three years of the HIBALL partnership.
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HIBALL Winter School 2023
date:Mar 29 2023
Recordings are now available for the HIBALL Winter School 2023
Go to youtube
Primate cerebellar scaling in connection to the cerebrum: a 34-species phylogenetic comparative analysis
date: Mar 2023
The cerebellum has long been viewed as a functionally homogenous structure, only involved in the fine control of the motor system. However, over the last decades it has become increasingly clear that the cerebellum contributes to wide-ranging higher-order associative function, such as abstract reasoning, theory of mind, and affect regulation, as well.
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BigBrain Workshop 2023 - Save the date!
date: Oct 5-6, 2023
You are cordially invited to attend the 7th BigBrain Workshop, taking place in the beautiful city of Reykjavik, Iceland. This workshop is an opportunity for the neuroscientific community to come together and present their research, discuss future prospects, and explore how to better leverage high-performance computing and artificial intelligence to create multimodal, multiresolution tools for the high-resolution BigBrain and related datasets.
Go to webpage
6th BigBrain Workshop: From microstructure to functional connectomics
date: Nov 22 2022
Recordings for the BigBrain Workshop 2022 are now online.
Go to the event page.
date: 17 Nov 2022
We have a new HIBALL PhD! Christian Schiffer successfully defended his doctoral thesis on 'Deep neural networks for large-scale cytoarchitectonic mapping of the human brain' today and is now Dr. Schiffer 🥳
Congratulations!

About the BigBrain

Full dataset over 1TB

Scans at 20μm resolution

Multiple formats

An expanding brain atlas

A thriving community

What People Say About the BigBrain

Why create the BigBrain

A message from Dr. Zilles

the major advantage of the BigBrain for our work is that the image data of the human brain are registered as a 3D volume at very high spatial resolution. Since the human brain is folded, any part of the cortical ribbon may be subjected to the geometrical effects of this folding, i.e. the cortex is obliquely or even tangentially sectioned at various sites in a 2D representation, e.g. in images of single microtome sections. This effect hampers the measurement of any cortical structure which is bound to the 3D columnar architecture of the cortex. In contrast, the BigBrain allows analyses in 3D, and thus has opened the door to many studies which would not be possible in 2D representations.

Martha Crago

Vice-Principal (Research + Innovation) McGill University

With HIBALL the partnership between two world-leading research institutions in computational neuroscience will provide an important platform for the scientists to conduct innovative, interdisciplinary, and complementary research in a rich and collaborative setting.

Yoshua Bengio

Mila Scientific Director, Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute

HIBALL assembles a team with world-leading expertise in neuroimaging, artificial intelligence, neuroscience and neuroinformatics, which complements well the team at Mila. The active participation of several PIs with ties to Mila is very exciting, and we anticipate this lab will further expand the collaboration between neuroscience and AI experts in the Montreal ecosystem, leading to cutting-edge discoveries in both fields.

Viktor Jirsa

Directeur de Recherche, CNRS

HIBALL can build on a remarkable expertise and international reputation and will lead to high impact contributions in Human Brain Atlasing, Neuroinformatics, and Machine Learning.