Overview
- Researchers reconstructed roughly 10,000 histological sections from five post‑mortem human brains and aligned them to MRI using artificial intelligence.
- The atlas delineates 333 probabilistic regions of interest and includes a companion Bayesian tool that segments these regions in routine MRI scans within minutes.
- Validation on thousands of MRI datasets showed reliable identification across scanner types, matching manual labels in an ultra‑high‑resolution ex vivo dataset.
- Applied to more than 3,000 in vivo scans, NextBrain enabled finer analysis of age‑related brain volume changes than prior atlases.
- All data, tools, and visualisation resources are freely available via the FreeSurfer platform, with potential to accelerate research into neurodegeneration such as Alzheimer’s.