Description

This image is a high-resolution, wide-field montage of the entire surface of the mouse retina. This image is comprised of several hundred images (tiles) individually collected and then seamlessly "stitched" together into one large image, in a manner similar to that of Google earth. Individual cells, in this case retinal astrocytes, are then manually identified and annotated by a researcher, subsequently those annotations are used by a custom visualization program to segment out single-cell boundaries and assigned unique hues to discern bio-territories. This novel technique allows scientists in the visual neuroscience community to extract biologically meaningful quantitative data on an unprecedented scale to use for comparisons to aging, developing, or diseased retinas.