Whole-brain Optical Imaging:A Powerful Tool for Precise Brain Mapping at the Mesoscopic Level

The mammalian brain is a highly complex network that consists of millions to billions of densely-interconnected neurons.Precise dissection of neural circuits at the mesoscopic level can provide important structural information for understanding the brain.Optical approaches can achieve submicron lateral resolution and achieve“optical sectioning”by a variety of means,which has the natural advantage of allowing the observation of neural circuits at the mesoscopic level.Automated whole-brain optical imaging methods based on tissue clearing or histological sectioning surpass the limitation of optical imaging depth in biological tissues and can provide delicate structural information in a large volume of tissues.Combined with various fluorescent labeling techniques,whole-brain optical imaging methods have shown great potential in the brain-wide quantitative profiling of cells,circuits,and blood vessels.In this review,we summarize the principles and implementations of various whole-brain optical imaging methods and provide some concepts regarding their future development.

How Big Data and High-performance Computing Drive Brain Science

Brain science accelerates the study of intelligence and behavior,contributes fundamental insights into human cognition,and offers prospective treatments for brain disease.Faced with the challenges posed by imaging technologies and deep learning computational models,big data and high-performance computing(HPC)play essential roles in studying brain function,brain diseases,and large-scale brain models or connectomes.We review the driving forces behind big data and HPC methods applied to brain science,including deep learning,powerful data analysis capabilities,and computational performance solutions,each of which can be used to improve diagnostic accuracy and research output.This work reinforces predictions that big data and HPC will continue to improve brain science by making ultrahigh-performance analysis possible,by improving data standardization and sharing,and by providing new neuromorphic insights.

The Brain Connectome for Chinese Reading

Chinese,as a logographic language,fundamentally differs from alphabetic languages like English.Previous neuroimaging studies have mainly focused on alphabetic languages,while the exploration of Chinese reading is still an emerging and fast-growing research field.Recently,a growing number of neuroimaging studies have explored the neural circuit of Chinese reading.Here,we summarize previous research on Chinese reading from a connectomic perspective.Converging evidence indicates that the left middle frontal gyrus is a specialized hub region that connects the ventral with dorsal pathways for Chinese reading.Notably,the orthography-to-phonology and orthography-to-semantics mapping,mainly processed in the ventral pathway,are more specific during Chinese reading.Besides,in addition to the left-lateralized language-related regions,reading pathways in the right hemisphere also play an important role in Chinese reading.Throughout,we comprehensively review prior findings and emphasize several challenging issues to be explored in future work.