Developing a Stereotypical Drosophila Brain Atlas

Brain research requires a standardized brain atlas to describe both the variance and invariance in brain anatomy and neuron connectivity. In this study, we propose a system to construct a standardized 3D Drosophila brain atlas by integrating labeled images from different preparations. The 3D fly brain atlas consists of standardized anatomical global and local reference models, e.g., the inner and external brain surfaces and the mushroom body. The averaged global and local reference models are generated by the model averaging procedure, and then the standard Drosophila brain atlas can be compiled by transferring the averaged neuropil models into the averaged brain surface models. The main contribution and novelty of our study is to determine the average 3D brain shape based on the isosurface suggested by the zero-crossings of a 3D accumulative signed distance map. Consequently, in contrast with previous approaches that also aim to construct a stereotypical brain model based on the probability map and a user-specified probability threshold, our method is more robust and thus capable to yield more objective and accurate results. Moreover, the obtained 3D average shape is useful for defining brain coordinate systems and will be able to provide boundary conditions for volume registration methods in the future. This method is distinguishable from those focusing on 2D + Z image volumes because its pipeline is designed to process 3D mesh surface models of Drosophila brains.