The BIC 'Colin27' brain makes history and enters museum in Europe

The Museum of Natural Sciences of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences has just opened a new permanent exhibition in Brussels: 'The gallery of Humankind'. The Museum has asked Dr. D. Louis Collins whether they could produce a 3-D print of the historical Colin27 brain. This brain is that of a human volunteer scanned 27 times in an MRI, back in 1998.

This particular dataset and the associated data processing, which consisted in spatially registering and averaging all 27 data volumes from all sessions, provived the striking demonstration of how data quality could be dramatically improved to unprecedented levels at the time. Since the publication of the seminal reference paper, cited below, the Colin27 brain template has been made publically available to the community, and has been used in countless neuroimaging studies by hundreds of scientists and students worldwide. The seminal journal article itself has been cited about 700 times since publication (Google Scholar).         

Holmes, C. J., Hoge, R., Collins, L., Woods, R., Toga, A. W., & Evans, A. C. (1998). Enhancement of MR images using registration for signal averaging. J Comput Assist Tomogr, 22(2), 324-333.