Three-dimensional reconstruction of a rhesus monkey brain from the Friedrich Sanides collection.

For this study, serial sections of a rhesus monkey brain prepared by Friedrich Sanides (1914-1984) were used to examine the architectonic parcellation of the cerebral cortex. The sections through the anterior part of a rhesus monkey brain (250 sections stained for myeloarchitecture and 250 sections stained for cytoarchitecture) were digitally photographed, three-dimensionally aligned to each other, and three-dimensionally reconstructed. For three-dimensional registration of the sections rigid transformations were applied with the Euclidian distance as fit criterion. Afterwards, the derived volume was used for manual segmentation of several central structures of the monkey brain (caudate nucleus, putamen, pallidum, thalamus, ventricles, cortex, hippocampus, amygdala, etc.). Thus, a three-dimensional model of the rhesus monkey brain was developed, which can be used as a three-dimensional framework for mapping morphological structures as basis for a digital atlas.