Setting up

• First install cellfinder, following the Installation guide

• Download the data from here (it will take a long time to download). Thanks to Sepiedeh Keshavarzi (twitter) for sharing the data.

• Unzip the data to a directory of your choice (doesn't matter where). You should end up with a directory called test_brain with two directories, each containing 2800 images

• Open a terminal (Linux) or your command prompt (Windows)

• Navigate to the directory containing the test_brain directory (e.g. using cd)

• Activate your conda environment ​

Before you start

To run cellfinder, you need to know:

• Where your data is (in this case, it's the path to the test_brain directory)

• Which image is the primary signal channel (the one with the labelled cells) and which is the secondary autofluorescence channel. In this case, test_brain/ch00 is the signal channel and test_brain/ch01 is the autofluroescence channel

• Where you want to save the output data (we'll just save it into a directory called cellfinder_outputin the same directory as the test_brain)

• The pixel sizes of your data in microns (see Image definition for details). In this case, our data is 2um per pixel in in the coronal plane and the spacing of each plane is 5um

• The orientation of your data. For atlas registration (using brainreg) the software needs to know how you acquired your data (coronal, sagittal etc.). For this cellfinder uses bg-space. Full details on how to enter your data orientation can be found here, but for this tutorial, the orientation is psl, which means that the data origin is the most posterior, superior, left voxel.

• Which atlas you want to use (you can see which are available by running brainglobe list. In this case, we want to use a mouse atlas (as that's what our data is), and we'll use the 10um version of the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas​

Now you're ready to start Running cellfinder.