BigBrain is a freely accessible high-resolution 3D digital atlas of the human brain, released in June 2013 by a team of researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and the German Forschungszentrum Jülich and is part of the European Human Brain Project.
His brain, after being removed from the skull, was first scanned using an MRI machine, then embedded in paraffin and sliced into 7,404 20 μm thick sections using a large-scale microtome.
The brain sections were placed on large glass slides and then stained for cell bodies using the Merker method,[3] a process that causes the grey matter in the brain to be darkly stained while leaving the white matter uncoloured.
The stained sections were scanned and digitized using a flatbed scanner at 2400dpi, creating a one terabyte raw record.
The corrected data were then assembled into a three-dimensional computer model with a spatial isotropic 3D resolution of 20 μm.