NeuroNames
NeuroNames
Nomenclature for structures in the brain and spinal cord
NeuroNames is an integrated nomenclature for structures in the brain and spinal cord of the four species most studied by neuroscientists: human, macaque, rat and mouse. It offers a standard, controlled vocabulary of common names for structures, which is suitable for unambiguous neuroanatomical indexing of information in digital databases. Terms in the standard vocabulary have been selected for ease of pronunciation, mnemonic value, and frequency of use in recent neuroscientific publications. Structures and their relations to each other are defined in terms of the standard vocabulary. Currently NeuroNames contains standard names, synonyms and definitions of some 2,500 neuroanatomical entities.
 | This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. (August 2020) |
The nomenclature is maintained by the University of Washington and is the core component of a tool called "BrainInfo". BrainInfo helps one identify structures in the brain. One can either search by a structure name or locate the structure in a brain atlas and get information such as its location in the classical brain hierarchy, images of the structure, what cells it has, its connections and genes expressed there. Information can be accessed by any of some 16,000 synonyms in eight languages.
NeuroNames is a source vocabulary of the Metathesaurus of the Unified Medical Language System. It is described in depth in the following three scientific articles:
- D. M. Bowden & R. F. Martin (March 1995). "NeuroNames Brain Hierarchy". NeuroImage. 2 (1): 63–83. doi:10.1006/nimg.1995.1009. PMID 9410576. S2CID 24847350.
- D. M. Bowden & M. F. Dubach (2003). "NeuroNames 2002". Neuroinformatics. 1 (1): 43–59. doi:10.1385/NI:1:1:043. PMID 15055392. S2CID 12575028.
- D. M. Bowden; E. Song; J. Kosheleva; M. F. Dubach (2011). "NeuroNames: An Ontology for the BrainInfo Portal to Neuroscience on the Web". Neuroinformatics. 10 (1): 97–114. doi:10.1007/s12021-011-9128-8. PMC 3247656. PMID 21789500.
