Online histological atlas of the Göttingen minipig brain

BACKGROUND: The cytoarchitecture of the Göttingen minipig telencephalon has recently been elucidated in the published article (Bjarkam et al., 2017). The aim of the current paper is to describe how such data can be presented in an online histological atlas of the Gottingen minipig brain and how this atlas was constructed. METHODS: Two sets of histological sections were used. One set was photographed in high resolution and labelled, the other set in low resolution (resized first set) was used for reference on the computer screen. The two sets of microphotographs enable, using the freely available JQuery Image Zoom Plugin, the subsequent construction of a simple HTML-based atlas web page with a “virtual microscope like” style, which allowed magnifying of the base image (low-resolution image) up to the maximum resolution of the high-resolution image. In addition, we describe how the established histological atlas can be accompanied by a set of similar T1-weighted MRI pictures. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Histological and MRI pictures are presented in atlas form on www.cense.dk/minipig_atlas/index.html. The described pipeline represent a cheap and freely available way to present histological images, in online virtual microscopic atlas form, and may thus be of general interest to anyone who would like to present histological data accordingly.