INCF Program on Digital Brain Atlasing: Increasing Community Adoption of WHS

Abstract

The goal of the INCF Program on Digital Brain Atlasing is to provide the vision and direction necessary to make the rapidly growing collection of multidimensional data of the rodent brain widely accessible and usable to the international community. To this aim, the INCF Program on Digital Brain Atlasing developed Waxholm Space (WHS), a coordinate-based conceptual and physical atlas space for the adult C57BL/6 mouse, and its underlying digital atlasing infrastructure (DAI) that allows researchers to query the spatial location of their own images and retrieve structure names, gene expression, and other data associated with the user-defined point of interest in resources such as the Allen Brain Atlas. Although WHS/DAI have the potential to provide researchers with the ability to investigate research questions in a manner typically beyond the scope of a single laboratory, community adoption of WHS/DAI has been limited. To determine the barriers to community adoption of WHS/DAI, the Oversight Committee (OC) of the INCF Digital Brain Atlasing Program convened a 2-day workshop that presented community members with a review of the current state of atlasing and atlasing tools, as well as an overview of WHS/DAI. The participants of the workshop identified issues with usability, accuracy, and sustainability as the major barriers to community adoption of WHS/DAI. To address the issue of usability, it was recommended that INCF develop more user-friendly tools to access the DAI as well as develop tutorials and training activities to elicit community feedback. To reduce the barrier of accuracy, it was recommended that INCF should ensure that the registration between registered atlases is correct and that the information received from the atlases is accurate, possibly by engaging the community to help evaluate whether the registration between atlases currently registered to WHS retrieve accurate information. Finally, to reduce the barrier of sustainability, they recommended that INCF continuously update and host tools that access the DA.