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cerebroViz: an R package for anatomical visualization of spatiotemporal brain data
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

cerebroViz: an R package for anatomical visualization of spatiotemporal brain data

Ethan Bahl, Tanner Koomar and Jacob J Michaelson
Bioinformatics (Oxford, England), Vol.33(5), pp.762-763
03/01/2017
DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btw726
PMCID: PMC5870797
PMID: 28011779
url
https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btw726View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

Summary: Spatiotemporal transcriptomic profiling has provided valuable insight into the patterning of gene expression throughout the human brain from early fetal development to adulthood. When combined with prior knowledge of a disease's age at onset and region-specificity, these expression profiles have provided the necessary context to both strengthen putative gene-disease associations and infer new associations. While a wealth of spatiotemporal expression data exists, there are currently no tools available to visualize this data within the anatomical context of the brain, thus limiting the intuitive interpretation of many such findings. We present cerebroViz, an R package to map spatiotemporal brain data to vector graphic diagrams of the human brain. Our tool allows rapid generation of publication-quality figures that highlight spatiotemporal trends in the input data, while striking a balance between usability and customization. cerebroViz is generalizable to any data quantifiable at a brain-regional resolution and currently supports visualization of up to thirty regions of the brain found in databases such as BrainSpan, GTEx and Roadmap Epigenomics.
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