[The Current Status and Future Perspective of Neuroscience Research Using Whole-Organ 3D Tissue Clearing and...

State-of-the-art tissue-clearing methods provide cellular resolution information of intact tissues in individual mammalian organs and the entire body. Combining these tissue-clearing methods with high-speed imaging and automated image analysis using light-sheet microscopy can reduce the cost and speed up tissue examination by several orders of magnitude. Moreover, the chemical nature of these methods enable antibody labeling of entire organs, which can be applied to thick human tissues. By combining powerful tissue clearing, labeling, imaging, and data analysis, scientists are able to extract structural and functional cellular information from complex mammalian bodies and large human specimens. Furthermore, the rapid generation of terabytes of imaging data calls for efficient computational approaches to address the challenges of large data set analysis and management. In this review, we described how tissue-clearing methods can provide an unbiased overview of mammalian bodies and human specimens at the system level, and discussed the current challenges and future possibilities in applying tissue-clearing methods to human neuroscience.