It establishes a backbone for designing and developing new, multi-purpose and user-extendable brain atlas platforms, serving as a potential standard across labs, hospitals, and medical schools. This novel architecture supports brain knowledge gathering, presentation, use, sharing, and discovery and is broadly applicable and useful in student- and educator-oriented neuroeducation for knowledge presentation and communication, research for knowledge acquisition, aggregation and discovery, and clinical applications in decision making support for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, and prediction.
Each unit is described in terms of its function, component modules and sub-modules, data handling, and implementation aspects. It contains four functional units, core cerebral models, knowledge database, research and clinical data input and conversion, and toolkit (supporting processing, content extension, atlas individualization, navigation, exploration, and display), all united by a user interface. The proposed architecture determines major components of the atlas, their mutual relationships, and functional roles. The human brain atlas is defined as a vehicle to gather, present, use, share, and discover knowledge about the human brain with highly organized content, tools enabling a wide range of its applications, massive and heterogeneous knowledge database, and means for content and knowledge growing by its users. Subsequently, an architecture of a multi-purpose, user-extendable reference human brain atlas is proposed and its implementation discussed. Here I introduce a new definition of a reference human brain atlas that serves education, research and clinical applications, and is extendable by its user.
Human brain atlas development is predominantly research-oriented and the use of atlases in clinical practice is limited.