The Brain Encyclopedia Atlas Project (BEAP): A Literature-Derived Atlas of Human Functional Neuroanatomy

The neuroscience literature contains thousands of studies localizing cognitive, sensory, and motor functions to specific brain regions, yet this knowledge remains fragmented across experimental modalities, naming conventions, and spatial reference systems. Consequently, relating reported activations, lesions, or stimulation sites to the broader functional literature often requires substantial manual synthesis. The Brain Encyclopedia Atlas Project (BEAP) was developed to address this challenge by providing a spatially grounded framework for organizing literature-defined brain regions. BEAP is an expert-curated neuroinformatics resource that aggregates and spatially indexes literature-defined cortical and subcortical functional regions within a common anatomical reference framework. The project identifies 108 neocortical fields and 18 cerebellar fields defined through an analysis of published figures from 1,453 human studies using functional neuroimaging, intracranial electrophysiology, and cortical stimulation. These regions were manually aligned to standard anatomical templates and associated with parcels of the Human Connectome Project multimodal parcellation (MMP1). Inclusion criteria required convergent functional evidence, lesion support, and boundary-related contrasts. Additionally, 340 allocortical, diencephalic, cerebellar, and brain stem nuclei were delineated through comparison with histological atlases and research articles. The resource is publicly accessible at https://brainatlas.online/3d-brain/, featuring an interactive three-dimensional brain model that interfaces directly with a curated encyclopedia. This platform provides structured entries synthesizing regional functional descriptions, boundary-defining evidence, internal organization, and connectivity annotations. Furthermore, each entry is designed to evolve through community feedback via a dedicated comment section. By providing a unified spatial context at the whole-cortex scale, BEAP enables systematic comparison across studies and facilitates the identification of recurring patterns in cortical organization. It serves as an integrative resource for research and education, supporting the contextualization of neuroimaging findings and the generation of hypotheses regarding large-scale brain organization.