QBI Neuroscience Seminar: 'Whole-brain 3D imaging and quantitative analysis'

Event Details

Date:

Wednesday, 12 June 2019 - Wednesday, 12 June 2019

Time:

11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Room:

QBI Level 7 Auditorium

UQ Location:

Queensland Brain Institute (St Lucia)

URL:

http://www.qbi.uq.edu.au/neuroscience-seminars

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Dr Dimtri Perrin
Senior Lecturer, Biomedical Data Science Group,
Queensland University of Technology

Title: 'Whole-brain 3D imaging and quantitative analysis'

Abstract: Slicing a brain damages it, and computational reconstruction is slow and error-prone. Yet, until recently it was the only way to investigate complex brain functions at the level of individual cells: lipids make the brain opaque, and tools like EEG and fMRI only allow measurements of cell groups or indirect observation of overall activity patterns. Tissue clearing, by contrast, removes these lipids and allows high-resolution whole-brain imaging, therefore preserving important structures. Initially clearing was incomplete, or rapidly quenched the fluorescence proteins used to monitor cell activity. Several methods have now addressed this, and are efficient on the brain and most other organs. Clearing is only the first step: the value is in the quantitative analysis of the samples. In this presentation, I will give an overview of the CUBIC clearing and imaging protocol, and will discuss how the data is processed and analysed to identify region-specific neuron activation patterns in the brain.