Mark Longair

Research Homepage

I am a PhD student funded by the EPSRC/MRC Doctoral Training Centre in Neuroinformatics. The focus of my research is building up a detailed connectivity map of the brain of Drosophila melanogaster, with the aim of modelling the function of the fruit fly brain. I am building tools for the annotation and registration of confocal microscope scans of whole-mount brains. These are incorporated into an easy-to-use web application for the archiving and sharing of these data.

My PhD supervisors are:


This page is in need of an update with a fuller description of my work, but for the moment these movies and images may give you an idea of the kinds of things that I'm doing:

Thumbnail image of a rotating volume
    rendering of the central complex

This image of the central complex is a volume rendering from an averaged template image generated from 32 brains after each has been registered onto the Standard Brain template. The colour of each neuropil region is taken from the Standard Brain segmentation of the central complex.
 
Thumbnail image of single brains from different GAL4
    lines overlayed

This image was created by taking three scans of three different GAL4 lines (i.e. 3 individual brains), registering each onto a Standard Brain template, composing the results and showing a slice through the fan-shaped body. The region corresponding to the fan-shaped body in one of the Standard Brain segmentations is shaded a light grey colour.
 
Thumbnail image of single brains from different GAL4
    lines overlayed

Whereas the image above was of three individual brains, this animation is of a MIP rendering of two averaged GAL4 lines, each average created from about 10 brains each.
 
A screenshot of the results of uploading a scan to the
    confocal archive.

Another tool I am currently developing (a public beta will be available soon) is an online confocal scan archive, designed for simply sharing data with our group, launching the other tools I am working on and providing a centralised (and so easy to back-up) image store.. This screenshot shows the results of uploading a scan, confirming that the metadata from within the file has been extracted.
 

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Mark Longair

Last modified: Mon Oct 20 16:08:51 BST 2003 (validate HTML | validate CSS)