Date: Wednesday, August 19, 2026, 3:00-4:00PM ET
From MicroCT to Scaffold: Characterizing and Modeling the Internal Architecture of the Human Vagus Nerve
Presenters: Todd Levy, M.S., Senior Biomedical Engineer/microCT processing pipeline developer, Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health
Mabelle Lin, PhD, Software Developer, Auckland Bioengineering Institute
About the Seminar
While gross anatomical mapping reveals where vagus nerve branches emerge along the trunk, understanding how the fascicles that compose those branches are organized within the nerve requires high-resolution imaging. As part of the NIH SPARC-funded REVA project, we developed a microCT processing pipeline to characterize the internal fascicular architecture of the human vagus nerve across 29 cadaveric donors. Vagus nerve segments were stained with Lugol's iodine and scanned with microCT, and an iteratively trained a 3D UNet (nnUNet) was used to produce semantic segmentation masks of fascicles and epineurium, followed by manual quality assurance, skeletonization, and graph-based representation of fascicular trajectories. All primary (reconstructed microCT volumes and branch and microfil markers) and most derivative data (segmentation masks and skeleton graphs) have been published in 29 SPARC datasets on the SPARC Portal.
For each subject, the nerve segments are registered and connected into a subject-specific whole vagus comprising nerve skeleton graphs, connected fascicles, anatomical landmarks and anterior microfil orientation points. This set of data is then registered to a standard vagus anatomical scaffold which defines a three-dimensional coordinate system independent of subject scale by fitting to the nerve trunk path, fixed landmarks and orientation, while preserving individual branching information. Use of standard anatomical scaffolds allows comparative studies of vagus nerve anatomy across a population, and they can also be mapped into a three-dimensional whole-body scaffold to show spatial relationships between the vagus nerve and target organs.
After the seminar, the video recording will be available on the SPARC YouTube Channel.
| Research | Contributions |
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Auckland Bioengineering Institute Project Link |
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The Feinstein Institute Project Link |
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Scaffold map - Human vagus nerve Access the Dataset |
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REVA Human Vagus Nerve data collection Access the Collection |
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Bahadir S, et al. A standardized, surgically relevant map of emergence of organ-specific branches in the human vagus nerve. bioRxiv, 2026. DOI: 10.64898/2026.05.08.723047. bioRxiv preprint |
