Workshop 2

Understanding the complexities of the brain is a grand challenge, partly because of the wide range of scales involved. Many investigators are now pushing forward to surmount the technical hurdles associated with determining the wiring diagram of specific regions of the brain.  Modern light microscopic methods do not provide adequate resolution for tracking the fine details of cellular processes.  Higher resolution imaging methods, like 3D electron microscopies, are difficult to apply to the very large volumes of brain tissue, which are required for such mapping.  However, recent successes suggest that efforts to accelerate the development of computer-automated methods of both light and electron microscopy may ultimately enable more complete spatial mapping of nervous systems. Presentations in this session will consider these issues and describe progress in imaging cell types and their detailed relationships within key structural domains of nervous systems. The integration of these large and high-resolution multiscale volumes with emerging atlas frameworks will also be discussed. This session will consist of three lectures and a subsequent panel discussion.