Prof. Dr. Boudewijn Lelieveldt

Guest speaker: Prof. dr. ir. Boudewijn Lelieveldt – Professor Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology at LUMC Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum. 

How to standardize a brain? Data visualization for the Human and Mammalian Brain Atlas project.

Abstract:

The US Brain Initiative (BI) was launched in 2013 initially to develop novel technology to see the (human) brain in action with single cell resolution. Currently in its third phase, the NIH started in 2022 the BI Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) to provide a standardized whole-brain single cell transcriptomic atlas for the marmoset, macaque and human brain: The Human and Mammalian Brain Atlas project (HMBA). In this presentation, an overview of the HMBA project will be given, with specific focus on our contribution in this project: we develop freely available data visualization and analysis software that helps the user explore and gain insight in these exascale omics datasets. The talk includes live software demo’s of Cytosplore Viewer, which enables users to visualize and compare several HMBA single-cell and spatial transcriptomics datasets, and SpaceWalker, which enables interactive exploration of gene expression gradients in whole-brain spatial transcriptomics data. Examples will be given of how these datasets can be deployed for computational hypothesis generation and for the design of subsequent wet-lab validation experiments.