  Microscopic analysis of histological sections is considered the "gold
standard" to verify structural parcellations in the human brain. Its high
resolution allows the study of laminar and columnar patterns of cell
distributions, which build an important basis for the simulation of cortical
areas and networks. However, such cytoarchitectonic mapping is a semiautomatic,
time consuming process that does not scale with high throughput imaging. We
present an automatic approach for parcellating histological sections at 2um
resolution. It is based on a convolutional neural network that combines
topological information from probabilistic atlases with the texture features
learned from high-resolution cell-body stained images. The model is applied to
visual areas and trained on a sparse set of partial annotations. We show how
predictions are transferable to new brains and spatially consistent across
sections.
