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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

Alan Evans named Fellow of the Royal Society
date: Oct 08, 2024
Alan Evans, PhD, was among the 85 new Fellows of the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s national academy of sciences, announced May 14, 2024. Candidates were nominated for their substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge.
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BigBrain Workshop 2024
date: Mar 20, 2024
The 8th BigBrain Workshop took place in the beautiful city of Padua, Italy. The conference was on 10-11 September, preceded by a training day on 9 September. Click below to see the full conference videos.
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2024 OHBM Annual Meeting
date: July 09, 2024
The HIBALL Team presented the BigBrain data and tools at the annual OHBM meeting in Seoul, South Korea on June 23-27, 2024. It was fun to meet the community and discuss multimodal, high-resolution neuroscientific data and tools.
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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.