The past year was a good one for open-source tools. Based on the use of our website, sixty projects were accessed more than 100 times over the year. Four projects stood out with the most page hits. Two of these are video related. The other two are tools for histology.
The most hits on the website over the year was for our Video Repository and our Curated List of Video Recordings. These are collections of video recordings of animals performing commonly used behavioral tasks. We are thrilled that the resource has been helpful to the community. We could not have launched the repository without contributions from the community, and would like to thank Linda Amarante, Tim Allen, Cherish Ardinger, David Linsenbardt, Matt Smear, Meaghan Creed, Zach Pennington, Denise Cai, Sam Golden, and Michael McDannald for contributing videos to the collection.
A more recent addition, the Curated List of Video Recordings, put together by Abby St Jean (an undergraduate neuroscience major at American University), includes videos shared by a wider range of projects including some of the core development teams of currently available methods for quantitative video analysis. We will post about the usage of videos from the collections in a forthcoming post in 2025.
The second most hits on the website was for FASTMAP (Flexible Atlas Segmentation Tool for Multi Area Processing of Biological Images). It allows researchers to register brain atlases like the Allen Atlas, as well as custom atlas plates, to a wide array of tissue preparations and tissue types. The project clearly fills in a gap in the available tools for working with brain data. It was developed by Dylan Terstege, Daniela Oboh, and Jonathan Epp. We will post about how FASTMAP has been used by other groups in 2025.
The third most popular project on our website was MoSeq and the related project Keypoint MoSeq. These are video methods for capturing behavioral “syllables” and transitions between behaviors and relating them to a variety of experimental manipulations and measurements of brain activity. The tools were developed by Sandeep Robert Datta and his research group. The impact of these tools is tremendous, and we will post about studies using MoSeq and Keypoint MoSeq in a forthcoming post next year.
The fourth most popular project was another method for histology called WholeBrain and the related OpenBrainMap. These tools perform large-scale whole-brain mappings of the molecular identity of single neurons. They were developed by Daniel Fürth and others in the research group of Konstantinos Meletis. The tools are transformative for the field and a testament to the power of open-source software. We will post about some of the initial impacts of WholeBrain and OpenBrainMap in a forthcoming post next year.
Finally, we would like to acknowledge the people who worked on the OpenBehavior website and contributed to our other efforts over the past year: Kevin Chavez Lopez, Jensen Palmer, Matt Laubach, Abby St Jean, Samantha White, Sean Bradley, Mark Laubach, and students in the Computational Methods course in the Neuroscience program at American University.
Stay tuned for more posts on the impact of open-source tools in 2025!