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Updated: Mar 1, 2026

Whole-Brain Single-Cell Imaging and Analysis of Intact Neonatal Mouse Brains Using MRI, Tissue Clearing, and Light-Sheet Microscopy
Published on: August 1, 2022
An ontologically consistent MRI-based atlas of the mouse diencephalon
Charles Watson1, Andrew L Janke2, Carlo Hamalainen3
1The Australian Mouse Brain Mapping Consortium, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia; Health Sciences, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, Australia; Neuroscience Research Australia and The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
Abstract:
In topological terms, the diencephalon lies between the hypothalamus and the midbrain. It is made up of three segments, prosomere 1 (pretectum), prosomere 2 (thalamus), and prosomere 3 (the prethalamus). A number of MRI-based atlases of different parts of the mouse brain have already been published, but none of them displays the segments the diencephalon and their component nuclei. In this study we present a new volumetric atlas identifying 89 structures in the diencephalon of the male C57BL/6J 12 week mouse. This atlas is based on an average of MR scans of 18 mouse brains imaged with a 16.4T scanner. This atlas is available for download at www.imaging.org.au/AMBMC. Additionally, we have created an FSL package to enable nonlinear registration of novel data sets to the AMBMC model and subsequent automatic segmentation.

