  The evolutionary success of ants and other social insects is considered to be
intrinsically linked to division of labor and emergent collective intelligence.
The role of the brains of individual ants in generating these processes,
however, is poorly understood. One genus of ant of special interest is
Pheidole, which includes more than a thousand species, most of which are
dimorphic, i.e. their colonies contain two subcastes of workers: minors and
majors. Using confocal imaging and manual annotations, it has been demonstrated
that minor and major workers of different ages of three species of Pheidole
have distinct patterns of brain size and subregion scaling. However, these
studies require laborious effort to quantify brain region volumes and are
subject to potential bias. To address these issues, we propose a group-wise 3D
registration approach to build for the first time bias-free brain atlases of
intra- and inter-subcaste individuals and automatize the segmentation of new
individuals.
