News

News | Research

AI Creates Virtual Stainings of Brain Tissue

Researchers at INM‑1 have developed a new method to visualize the fine structure of the brain without elaborate laboratory procedures. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), they can now virtually show how nerve cells are distributed and how they connect with nerve fibers. The study was published in Imaging Neuroscience.

Cécile and Oskar Vogt with their Pantomikrotom, a microtome for large sections, in the institute (around 1905). Courtesy Vogt Archive, Düsseldorf.
News

New in "Brain": The Vogt Collection in Düsseldorf

The year 2025 marks the 150th anniversary of Cécile Vogt's birth and the 155th anniversary of Oskar Vogt's birth. To mark this occasion, Prof. Katrin Amunts highlights the Vogts' scientific collection and their estate in the Vogt Archive for the renowned journal Brain.

Cécile and Oskar Vogt
News

Why two pioneers of brain research never received the Nobel Prize

A new article in Frontiers in Neuroanatomy examines the scientific legacy of Cécile and Oskar Vogt. Their joint work shaped modern brain research — yet despite numerous nominations, they never received the Nobel Prize.

premotor cortex
News | Research

Premotor Cortex Remapped: Seven Subareas and Functional Distinction

Researchers from the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) and the Cécile and Oskar Vogt Institute for Brain Research have remapped the human premotor cortex, identifying seven clearly distinguishable subareas. The new histologically high-resolution maps show how the different regions are anatomically delineated. This new subdivision helps clarify the functional differences between these regions. The new maps are available in the Julich Brain Atlas, a core component of EBRAINS—the European digital research platform for neuroscience. The study has now been published in Communications Biology.

Event

The Julich Brain Atlas and the “Telematic Society”

“Between Image and Language – Thinking in the Telematic Society” is the title of the lecture by Professor Katrin Amunts on Tuesday, November 25, 2025, at the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts in Düsseldorf. The background is the utopia of a “telematic society,” conceived by media philosopher Vilém Flusser more than forty years ago. In such a society, human and technical communication systems are inseparably intertwined. According to this utopian vision, a world so thoroughly digitalized would itself digitalize human thought and radically transform the symbols of human exchange.

Workshop
News | Event Report

9th BigBrain Workshop: Strengthening European - Canadian collaboration in brain research

The 9th BigBrain Workshop (27-29 October 2025) in Berlin brought together leading researchers to explore the frontiers of ultra-high-resolution, multimodal brain data, modelling, and mapping, and to strengthen the links between European and Canadian neuroscience. The workshop served as the closing symposium for HIBALL.

ComSLI
News | Research

Microscopic brain map: ComSLI makes networks of nerve fibers visible in differently prepared tissue sections

An international team of researchers has successfully applied the recently developed imaging technique ComSLI (Computational Scattered Light Imaging) to brain sections prepared using a wide range of methods, enabling the visualization of the brain’s complex fiber network with micrometer precision. This achievement marks an important advance that opens new possibilities for neuroscience and biomedical research—such as renewed, in-depth analyses of existing tissue sections. Their findings have now been published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.

News

Timo Dickscheid to teach in Koblenz

Prof. Timo Dickscheid has accepted an appointment as Professor of "Computer Vision" at the University of Koblenz. 

AFNI
News | Research

Jülich Brain Atlas becomes new Default-Atlas in AFNI

The Jülich Brain Atlas is now the new standard atlas in AFNI, a widely used open-source tool for analyzing and visualizing functional MRI data. The atlas is an important resource for the neuroimaging community and provides detailed parcellations of brain regions based on microstructure.