HortaCloud: An Open and Collaborative Platform for Whole Brain Neuronal Reconstructions

• DOI: 10.1101/2025.03.13.642887
• Publication Date: 2025-03-14T12:05:18Z
• Authors: Konrad Rokicki; David Schauder; Donald J. Olbris; Cristian Goina; Jody Clements; Patrick Edson; Takashi Kawase; Robert Svirskas; Cameron Arshadi; David Feng; Jayaram Chandrash...; Tiago A. Ferreira

HortaCloud is a cloud-based, open-source platform designed to facilitate the collaborative reconstruction of long-range projection neurons from whole-brain light microscopy data. By providing virtual environments directly within the cloud, it eliminates the need for costly and time-consuming data downloads, allowing researchers to work efficiently with terabyte-scale volumetric datasets. Standardization of computational resources in the cloud make deployment easier and more predictable. The pay-as-you-go cloud model reduces adoption barriers by eliminating upfront investments in expensive hardware. Finally, HortaCloud’s decentralized architecture enables global collaboration between researchers and between institutions.