Pictures at an Exhibition

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The Brain Observatory at the 40^th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. The conference took place in San Diego, November, 13-17, 2010. 

This was YEAR ONE for our laboratory.  

Our team estimated that a few hundred visitors stopped by (we gave out all 500 copies of our pamphlet). The goal was to present the body of work that was completed in 2009 and 2010 in our laboratory, especially in regards to the examination of the amnesic patient H.M.. We showed a digital 3-Dimensional reconstruction of the brain of patient H.M. and of other patients created from thousands of real anatomical images. In order to be able to show and interact with the volumes effectively we had installed a workstation with 96 GB or RAM (memory) and even then we had to downsample the dataset by a factor of two. Nevertheless, we were able to provide the unprecedented experience of exploring the inner architecture of the brain in a virtual reality environment made with real images of the tissue. 'Flying' into the brain of patient H.M. we followed the trajectory of the tools that in the hands of Dr. Scoville (the surgeon who operated on patient H.M. back in 1953) dragged along the Medial temporal Lobe, and re-discovered the portion of the hippocampus that was left intact.  

We also debuted our unique technology to digitize a whole large histological section from the human brain at 20X magnification. We showed that it is possible to survey the entire slice and zoom in within any particular region to view individual cells or axons - a resolution of 1/2 micron per pixel. 

Finally, we were streaming the activity at the booth on our website via a web cam that was mounted on the top of our 'branding' banner. On Tuesday we switched web programming to a live broadcast from the lab (live from The Brain Observatory) showing Miss Sheh and Mr. Maechler busy sectioning the brain of a california Sea Lion. 

Even as a non-for-profit organization, renting equipment, furniture, and installations (including carpet and electricity) for the exhibit was expensive. Naturally, the lab was on a budget, so we had to be creative with the design. I wanted the exhibit to be reminiscent of an Apple store, with easy access to the computer screens where we were displaying our studies. So, rather than renting pre-installed furniture, we purchased a conference table from IKEA and placed it at the center of the booth. The computer monitors faced out and were connected with two major workstations under the table.  When we moved into the exhibitors' hall on Friday evening, I realized that 10x10 feet is not a lot of space after all. So, I asked the organizers if we could replace the carpet with one that had the same color of the one that was being laid down along the main corridors of the exhibit hall. Without an evident border between our area and the corridors we could expand beyond our assigned perimeter...but don't tell.

We bought two tall glass cabinets from IKEA to display histological glass slides like in a jewelry store. They needed to be glorified to emphasize how precious and fragile they are. We displayed sections from the human and the dolphin brains, two antique microscopes, and two clear plastic boxes the we build for our slide collections with a complete series of one every thirty six histological slides through a brain. 

We also hung a very large print (5x7 feet) of a stained section from the brain of patient H.M.. This print was supposed to be decorative, but also provocative. That is, it was supposed to make the statement that the race to generating more and more 'pixels' will not tell us more about the brain if we don't take the time to 'observe' the enormous amount of data that we generate with digitization. An image on paper still has the potential to provide the researcher with the full experience of observation. I personally believe that the paper media and large-format brain atlases can give an insight on the architecture of the brain that  matches the effectiveness of multi-resolution digital technologies (which we were also displaying on one of the workstations). But I am digressing.

We will e-mail everyone who visited the booth and whom we zapped with the bar code laser gun. Please write back and remind us of our conversations and of what you were interested in. There was so much traffic that there wasn't time to write complete notes on the discussions.

We are glad that everyone had so many good things to say about our science, our style and our vision.

Dr. Jacopo Annese

The main image:  A montage-style plan for booth 4132.

Special thanks to Mrs. Ginny Hiatt of The Expo Group and to Miss Allison Burns of The Society for Neuroscience (SfN), who were extremely helpful (and patient) assisting us with our first experience at setting up an exhibitor's booth at SfN.