Brainways

What Is Brainways?

Brainways is an AI-based tool for automated registration, quantification and generation of brain-wide activity networks based on fluorescence in coronal slices.

Why Brainways?

Coronal slice registration, cell quantification and whole-brain contrast analysis between experimental conditions should be made easily accessible from a single software, without requiring programming experience. Customization should be made easy by having a highly flexible pythonic backend.

Getting Started

To install and run brainways, run the following in your python environment:

pip install brainways
brainways ui

Follow our getting started guide for more details.

How it works

Brainways allows users to register, quantify and provide statistical contrast analysis by following several simple steps:

1. Rigid registration of coronal slices to a 3D atlas.
2. Non-rigid registration of coronal slices to a 3D atlas, to account for individual difference and imperfections in acquisition procedure.
3. Cell detection (using StarDist).
4. Quantification of cell counts per brain region.
5. Statistical analysis:
   • ANOVA contrast analysis.
   • PLS (Partial Least Square) analysis.
   • Network graph creation.

Architecture

Brainways is implemented as three modules. brainways.ui contains the GUI implementation as a napari plugin. brainways.ui is using brainways as its backend. All of the functionality is implemented in the brainways package. This separation was done to guarantee that brainways is a GUI-agnostic software, and can be fully accessed and manipulated through python code to allow custom complex usage scenarios. The code that was used to train, evaluate and run the automatic registration model resides in brainways-reg-model.

Development Status

Brainways is being actively developed by Ben Kantor of Bartal lab, Tel Aviv University, Israel. Our releases can be found here.

Citation

If you use brainways, please cite Kantor and Bartal (2023):

@article{kantor2023brainways,
  title={Brainways: An Open-Source AI-based Software For Registration and Analysis of Fluorescent   Markers on Coronal Brain Slices},
  author={Kantor, Ben and Ben-Ami Bartal, Inbal},
  journal={bioRxiv},
  pages={2023--05},
  year={2023},
  publisher={Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory}
}

License

Distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL v3.0 license, "brainways" is free and open source software

Issues

If you encounter any problems, please file an issue along with a detailed description.