Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, 3 Pasteur Street, 02-093, Warsaw, Poland,
Neuroinformatics. 2013 Oct;11(4):507-18. doi: 10.1007/s12021-013-9199-9.
Brain atlases are important tools of neuroscience. Traditionally prepared in paper book format, more and more commonly they take digital form which extends their utility. To simplify work with different atlases, to lay the ground for developing universal tools which could abstract from the origin of the atlas, efforts are being made to provide common interfaces to these atlases. 3D Brain Atlas Reconstructor service (3dBARs) described here is a repository of digital representations of different brain atlases in CAF format which we recently proposed and a repository of 3D models of brain structures. A graphical front-end is provided for creating and viewing the reconstructed models as well as the underlying 2D atlas data. An application programming interface (API) facilitates programmatic access to the service contents from other websites. From a typical user's point of view, 3dBARs offers an accessible way to mine publicly available atlasing data with a convenient browser based interface, without the need to install extra software. For a developer of services related to brain atlases, 3dBARs supplies mechanisms for enhancing functionality of other software. The policy of the service is to accept new datasets as delivered by interested parties and we work with the researchers who obtain original data to make them available to the neuroscience community at large. The functionality offered by the 3dBARs situates it at the core of present and future general atlasing services tying it strongly to the global atlasing neuroinformatics infrastructure.
脑图谱是神经科学的重要工具。传统上以纸质书籍的形式准备，越来越多地以数字形式出现，这扩展了它们的用途。为了简化对不同图谱的处理，为开发可以从图谱的起源抽象出来的通用工具奠定基础，正在努力为这些图谱提供通用接口。这里描述的 3D 大脑图谱重构服务 (3dBARs) 是我们最近提出的 CAF 格式的不同大脑图谱的数字表示的存储库，以及大脑结构的 3D 模型的存储库。提供了一个图形前端，用于创建和查看重构模型以及基础的 2D 图谱数据。应用程序编程接口 (API) 便于从其他网站以编程方式访问服务内容。从典型用户的角度来看，3dBARs 提供了一种可访问的方式，可以通过方便的基于浏览器的界面挖掘公开可用的图谱数据，而无需安装额外的软件。对于与大脑图谱相关的服务的开发人员来说，3dBARs 提供了增强其他软件功能的机制。该服务的政策是接受感兴趣方提供的新数据集，我们与获取原始数据的研究人员合作，使这些数据集可供广大神经科学界使用。3dBARs 提供的功能使其成为当前和未来通用图谱服务的核心，使其与全球图谱神经信息学基础设施紧密相连。
