brainlocation

For learning, not medical advice.

Credits and licences

Everything you see on brainlocation is built from openly licensed work. This page says whose, under which licence, and what we changed.

The 3D brain: BodyParts3D

The brain model comes from BodyParts3D 4.0, © The Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS), Japan, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.1 Japan (CC BY-SA 2.1 JP). The attribution DBCLS asks for:

“BodyParts3D, (c) The Database Center for Life Science licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.1 Japan”

Data: BodyParts3D download page · DBCLS licence terms.

What we changed

We took the mesh files for 40 brain structures (the hippocampus, amygdala, thalamus, lobes and their gyri, brainstem, cerebellum, ventricles and more) from the release’s part-of archive and, for the thalamus, amygdala, caudate nucleus, putamen, globus pallidus, corpus callosum, superior temporal gyrus (files FJ1837–FJ1840) and orbital gyri (FJ1793, FJ1794), its is-a archive. We put them in one coordinate frame, reduced them from about 221,000 to 124,000 vertices by vertex clustering so the whole brain is about 2 MB, and stored positions as 16-bit integers.

The derived meshes in /data/brain.bin and /data/brain.json are shared under the same licence, CC BY-SA 2.1 Japan, with the attribution above. You may reuse them on those terms.

The printable diagrams

The labelled brain diagram and the blank worksheet are drawn by tools/build-diagram.cjs from the same derived meshes: the side, midline and underside outlines are the meshes projected flat onto the page. Each sheet carries the line “Drawn from BodyParts3D, (c) The Database Center for Life Science, CC BY-SA 2.1 JP”. The diagrams and their SVG files are shared under the same licence, CC BY-SA 2.1 Japan: keep that credit line when you copy or adapt them, and share what you make from them on the same terms.

The 3D engine: three.js

three.js r160 (0.160.0), © 2010-2023 three.js authors, MIT licence. The files are served unmodified from this site (licence text); nothing loads from another server.

The text

Each “where it is” and “what it does” line is written for this site from the English Wikipedia article named next to it and listed under Sources on the front page. They describe anatomy and normal function only. Brainlocation is for learning, not medical advice.

The full credits file: CREDITS.md.