File structure

We first provide some further details to help explain the files names in BigMac. Second we provide a detailed file tree. As the full dataset is several TB of data, users are welcome to request any subset of the data as required. Expected file sizes for each modality are indicated below.

File naming

In vivo MRI

The in vivo MRI data were acquired from two scanning sessions. The folder last-scan contains data that was acquiried in the last in vivo scanning session. Here the brain is in its most similar state to the ex vivo MRI. The folder prime-de provides data where the functional and structural MRI have previously been released on the PRIME-DE database, where similar data (though without the dwi) is available for another 19 animals for cross subject comparisons.

This data was preprocessed using FSL tools and pipelines specifically designed for macaque data (MrCat: https://github.com/neuroecology/MrCat).

Postmortem MRI processing

Both raw and minimally processed MRI data are provided. The scripts used to process the data can be found in BigMac/MRI/Postmortem/scripts/preprocessing Briefly, the pre-processing includes some combination of Gibbs correction, signal drift correction, data normalisation and registration.

We also provide the output of various model fits including:

  • the diffusion tensor (Basser 1994)

  • the ball and stick model (Behrens 2007, extracting fibre orientations)

  • xtract (Warrington 2020, reconstructing wm tracts)

Not all of the postmortem MRI lies in the same native space as data were acquired over three different scanning sessions The different sessions include:

  1. structural MRI, T1maps, b04k @ 0.6mm

  2. b10k and b07k @ 1.0mm, 1000 grad dir

  3. b04k @ 1.0mm, b04k/b07/b10k data with linear + spherical tensor encoding

Consequently, we provide flirt/fnirt warp fields between different domains as well as warp fields to the F99 standard space.

In vivo data: the minimally processed with/without the data is ~4GB/8GB. Postmortem data: the minimally processed data with/without the raw data, bedpostx or xtract outputs is ~7GB/29GB.

Microscopy labels

Note the microscopy slides are labelled in the following way:

  • The brain was sectioned and stained in two blocks (anterior/posterior). e.g. Anterior/P001a or Posterior/H020x

  • P/H indicates PLI or Gallyas histology

  • 001 or 020 is the number of the slide on which the tissue section was mounted.

  • In the anterior block, slide 001a is the most anterior section and slide 100 is towards the middle of the AP axis.

  • In the posterior block, slide 001a is the most posterior section and slide 100 is towards the middle of the AP axis.

  • For the most anterior/posterior sections, multiple tissue sections were mounted on the same glass slide. These sections are therefore named 001a 001b 001c etc.

  • The ‘x’ is used to indicate that the slide had only a single tissue section such as in H020x

Some of the histology slides were too large to be digitised in a single image. Consequently we acquired two images, of the left and right hand side of the slide respectively. These are labelled ‘a’ and ‘b’. e.g. Anterior/H080x/H080a_structureTensor & Anterior/H080x/H080b_structureTensor

PLI data

Polarised light imaging utilises the birefringence of tissue to estimate the optic axis orientation per pixel. We typically assume that tissue birefringence is dominated by myelin and that the optic axis aligns with the fibre. The PLI resolution is approx 4 microns/pix.

PLI outputs several maps:

  • HSV_FOM.tif - colour coded orientations weighted by retardance values.

  • Inclination.tif - very approximate estimate of out-of-plane angle, used solely for MRI-microscopy coregistration.

  • In_plane.tif - the orientation within the microscopy plane.

  • Retardance.tif -describes the ellipticity of the polarisation, determined by the quantity, birefringence and inclination of the birefringent media.

  • Transmittance.tif - related to the amount of light extinguished by the sample.

Each PLI folder is <1.2GB depending on the size of the slide.

Myelin stained histology

The digitised histology images are provided at a resolution of 0.28 microns/pix in svs (Leica) format. These images can be viewed using the openly available QuPath viewer https://qupath.github.io/

Each digitised slide (svs) is up to < 10 GB. Larger slides were imaged in two parts, named H???a.svs and H???b.svs

Structure tensor analysis

The myelin stained histology slides were processed for structure tensor analysis to estimate the primary fibre orientation per pixel. Here we use a Gaussian kernel of 10 microns and estimate summary metrics over a local neighbourhood of 150x150 pixels, which is approx 40x40 microns.

The summary metrics include:

  • HSV.tif - the colour coded orientations weighted by the staining density

  • Orientation.tif - the mean in-plane fibre orientation across neighbourhood

  • RBG_thumb.tif - mean RGB value for neighbourhood

  • struc_tensor.mat - a matlab sturcture with 7 variables:

    • thumb - as above

    • FOD - the 2D fibre orientation distribution i.e. a frequency histogram of all orientations within the neighbourhood

    • k1/k2 - dispersion parameters from fitting a Bingham distribution to the FOD. Only k2 is meaningful for the 2D distribution.

    • O - the orientation

    • ODI1/ODI2 - the orientation dispersion index calculated from k1/k2

Each Gallyas slide (with the structure tensor and registration output, but without the svs files) is < 500MB.

MRI-microscopy registration

The PLI and structure tensor data were co-registered to the structural MRI using TIRL (Huszar 2019). TIRL is initialised using its slice_to_volume function and the provided configuration files.

  • volume.timg contains transforms to take the MRI data from voxel to real-world coordindates.

  • slice.timg contains transforms to take the 2D microscopy image to real-world coordinates that are coregistered to the MRI.

  • slice.tif is an image of the microscopy data downsampled to the resolution of the MRI.

  • volume.png is an image of the coregistered MRI data.

slice.tif and volume.png can be overlaid to assess the quality of the coregistration.

File tree

The organisation of BigMac files. You are welcome to ask for all or a subset of the data

BigMac-clean
    MRI
        Invivo
            last-scan
                dwi
                    data
                        bvals
                        bvecs
                        data.nii.gz
                        nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                        S0.nii.gz
                    data.dtifit
                        dti_FA.nii.gz
                        dti_MD.nii.gz
                        dti_V1.nii.gz
                        ...
                    masks
                        nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                    raw
                        ...
                func
                    data
                        func.nii.gz
                        func_cleaned.nii.gz
                    masks
                        brain_mask.nii.gz
                    raw
                        ...
                raw
                    ...
                struct
                    data
                        struct.nii.gz
                        struct_brain.nii.gz
                    masks
                        brain_mask.nii.gz
                    raw
                        ...
            prime-de
                dwi
                    data
                        bvals
                        bvecs
                        data.nii.gz
                        nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                        S0.nii.gz
                    data.dtifit
                        dti_FA.nii.gz
                        dti_MD.nii.gz
                        dti_V1.nii.gz
                        ...
                    masks
                        nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                    raw
                        ...
                func
                    data
                        func.nii.gz
                        func_cleaned.nii.gz
                    masks
                        brain_mask.nii.gz
                    raw
                        ...
                raw
                    ...
                struct
                    data
                        struct.nii.gz
                        struct_brain.nii.gz
                    masks
                        brain_mask.nii.gz
                    raw
                        ...
        Postmortem
            dwi
                b04k
                    0.6mm
                        data
                            bvals
                            bvecs
                            data.nii.gz
                            nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                            S0.nii.gz
                        data.bedpostX
                            dyads1.nii.gz
                            dyads2_thr0.05.nii.gz
                            dyads3_thr0.05.nii.gz
                            mean_f1samples.nii.gz
                            mean_f2samples.nii.gz
                            mean_f3samples.nii.gz
                            ...
                            xfms
                            xtract
                                native
                                    ...
                                standard
                                    ...
                        data.dtifit
                            dti_FA.nii.gz
                            dti_MD.nii.gz
                            dti_V1.nii.gz
                            ...
                        masks
                            mask_gm.nii.gz
                            mask_wm.nii.gz
                            nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                            nodif_brain_mask_unfilled.nii.gz
                        raw
                            ...
                        reg
                            diff2standard.nii.gz
                            dwi_0.6mm_2_dwi_1.0mm_b10k_fnirt
                                ...
                            dwi_0.6mm_2_dwi_1.0mm_b04k_fnirt
                                ...
                            dwi_0.6mm_2_F99_fnirt
                                ...
                            dwi_0.6mm_2_dwi_1.0mm_b10k_flirt
                                ...
                            dwi_0.6mm_2_struct_flirt
                                ...
                            standard2diff.nii.gz
                    1.0mm
                        data
                            bvals
                            bvecs
                            data.nii.gz
                            nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                            S0.nii.gz
                        data.bedpostX
                            dyads1.nii.gz
                            dyads2_thr0.05.nii.gz
                            dyads3_thr0.05.nii.gz
                            mean_f1samples.nii.gz
                            mean_f2samples.nii.gz
                            mean_f3samples.nii.gz
                            ...
                            xfms
                            xtract
                                native
                                    ...
                                standard
                                    ...
                        data.dtifit
                            dti_FA.nii.gz
                            dti_MD.nii.gz
                            dti_V1.nii.gz
                            ...
                        masks
                            mask_gm.nii.gz
                            mask_wm.nii.gz
                            nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                            nodif_brain_mask_unfilled.nii.gz
                        raw
                            ...
                        reg
                            diff2standard.nii.gz
                            dwi_1.0mm_b4k_2_dwi_1.mm_b10k_flirt
                                ...
                            dwi_1.0mm_b4k_2_struct_fnirt
                                ...
                            dwi_1.0mm_2_dwi_0.6mm_flirt
                                ...
                            dwi_1.0mm_b4k_2_dwi_1.mm_b10k_fnirt
                                ...
                            dwi_1.0mm_2_dwi_0.6mm_fnirt
                                ...
                            dwi_1.0mm_b4k_2_F99_fnirt
                                ...
                            standard2diff.nii.gz
                b07k
                    1.0mm
                        data
                            bvals
                            bvecs
                            data.nii.gz
                            nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                            S0.nii.gz
                        data.bedpostX
                            dyads1.nii.gz
                            dyads2_thr0.05.nii.gz
                            dyads3_thr0.05.nii.gz
                            mean_f1samples.nii.gz
                            mean_f2samples.nii.gz
                            mean_f3samples.nii.gz
                            ...
                            xfms
                            xtract
                                native
                                    ...
                                standard
                                    ...
                        data.dtifit
                            dti_FA.nii.gz
                            dti_MD.nii.gz
                            dti_V1.nii.gz
                            ...
                        masks
                            mask_gm.nii.gz
                            mask_wm.nii.gz
                            nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                            nodif_brain_mask_unfilled.nii.gz
                        raw
                            ...
                        reg
                            diff2standard.nii.gz
                            README
                            standard2diff.nii.gz
                b10k
                    1.0mm
                        data
                            bvals
                            bvecs
                            data.nii.gz
                            nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                            S0.nii.gz
                        data.bedpostX
                            dyads1.nii.gz
                            dyads2_thr0.05.nii.gz
                            dyads3_thr0.05.nii.gz
                            mean_f1samples.nii.gz
                            mean_f2samples.nii.gz
                            mean_f3samples.nii.gz
                            ...
                            xfms
                            xtract
                                native
                                    ...
                                standard
                                    ...
                        data.dtifit
                            dti_FA.nii.gz
                            dti_MD.nii.gz
                            dti_V1.nii.gz
                            ...
                        masks
                            mask_gm.nii.gz
                            mask_wm.nii.gz
                            nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                            nodif_brain_mask_unfilled.nii.gz
                        raw
                            ...
                        reg
                            diff2standard.nii.gz
                            dwi_1.0mm_2_dwi_0.6mm_fnirt
                                ...
                            dwi_1.0mm_2_struct_fnirt
                                ...
                            dwi_1.0mm_2_dwi_0.6mm_flirt
                                ...
                            dwi_1.0mm_2_F99
                                ...
                            standard2diff.nii.gz
                TensorEncoding
                    {b04k/b07k/b10k}
                        1.0mm
                            data.LTE (linear tensor encoding)
                                bvals
                                bvecs
                                data.nii.gz
                                nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                            data.LTE.dtifit
                                dti_FA.nii.gz
                                dti_MD.nii.gz
                                dti_V1.nii.gz
                                ...
                            data.STE (spherical tensor encoding)
                                bvals
                                bvecs
                                data.nii.gz
                                nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                            masks
                                nodif_brain_mask.nii.gz
                            raw
                                README

                    b04k+b07k+b10k.merged (data which is merged and fitted with dtd_gamma model)
                        data.nii.gz
                        dtd_gamma_MD.nii.gz
                        dtd_gamma_MKa.nii.gz
                        dtd_gamma_MKi.nii.gz
                        dtd_gamma_MKt.nii.gz
                        dtd_gamma_MKa.nii.gz
                        ...
                    b04k+b07k.merged (as above)
                        b04k+b07k.nii.gz
                        dtd_gamma_MD.nii.gz
                        dtd_gamma_MKa.nii.gz
                        dtd_gamma_MKi.nii.gz
                        dtd_gamma_MKt.nii.gz
                        dtd_gamma_MKa.nii.gz
                        ...
                    raw
                        ...
            scripts
                bedpostx_single_shell.sh
                dtifit.sh
                FLIRTconfig
                    ...
                FNIRTconfig
                    ...
                preprocessing
                    README
                    ...
                xtract.sh
            struct
                bSSFP
                    data
                        struct.nii.gz
                        struct_brain.nii.gz
                    masks
                        brain_mask.nii.gz
                    raw
                        ...
                    reg
                        bSSFP_2_MGE_flirt
                            ...
                MGE
                    data
                        struct.nii.gz
                        struct_brain.nii.gz
                        T1-like
                            T1-like_2.nii.gz
                            T1-like_2_with-background.nii.gz
                            T1-like.nii.gz
                    masks
                        brain_mask.nii.gz
                        brain_mask_unfilled.nii.gz
                        mask_csf.nii.gz
                        mask_gm.nii.gz
                        mask_wm.nii.gz
                    raw
                        ...
                    reg
                        README
                        struct_2_dwi_0.6mm_flirt
                            ...
                        struct_2_dwi_1.0mm_b10k_fnirt
                            ...
                        struct_2_dwi_1.0mm_b4k_fnirt
                            ...
                        struct_2_F99_flirt
                            ...
                        struct_2_F99_fnirt
                            ...
            T1maps
                data
                    T1.nii.gz
                masks
                    brain_mask.nii.gz
                raw
                    ...
                reg
                    T1maps_2_struct_flirt
                        ...
        Standard
            F99
                data
                    mri
                        ...
                    surf
                        ...
                McLaren
                    ...
                reg
                    F99_2_dwi_0.6mm_fnirt
                        ...
                    F99_2_dwi_1.0mm_b10k_fnirt
                        ...
                    F99_exvivo_2_struct_fnirt
                        ...
                    F99_2_dwi_1.0mm_b04k_fnirt
                        ...
                    F99_2_struct_fnirt
                        ...

    Microscopy
        PLI
            {Anterior/Posterior}
                P001a ... P101x (anterior)
                P001a ... P067x (posterior)
                    FOM_HSV.tif
                    Inclination.tif
                    In_plane.tif
                    Masks
                        P????_mask.tif
                        OR
                        P????_L_mask.tif
                        P????_R_mask.tif
                    Reg2MRI
                        {Full/Left/Right} (register full image or left/right hemisphere separately)
                            configuration.json
                            slice.tif
                            slice.timg
                            volume.png
                            volume.timg
                    Retardance.tif
                    Transmittance.tif
        Gallyas
            {Anterior/Posterior}
                H001a ... H103x (anterior)
                H001a ... H067x (posterior)
                    H???{a/b/x}_structureTensor (here x (a/b) indicates the slide was digitised in one (two) image(s))
                        HSV.tif
                        Orientation.tif
                        RGB_thumb.tif
                        struc_tensor.mat
                        Masks
                            H????_mask.tif
                            OR
                            H????_L_mask.tif
                            H????_R_mask.tif
                        Reg2MRI
                            {Full/Left/Right} (register full image or left/right hemisphere separately)
                                configuration.json
                                slice.tif
                                slice.timg
                                volume.png
                                volume.timg
                    svs
                        H???x.svs
                        OR
                        H???a.svs
                        H???b.svs