Fig. 4. Alignment of blocks and composition with decay.

A stack of 450 mouse cortex sections⁵ was block aligned (10 sections per block), then globally aligned by composing the linearly decayed stitching fields between blocks with varying decay distances. a–d The rough aligned sections, the aligned sections with decay distances of 10, 100, and 500 sections. The vertical axis is orthogonal to the cutting plane, while the horizontal axis is in the plane. e–h The 447th section of the sample above (see blue arrow along sides of (a–d)), approximately centered on the same blood vessel to demonstrate the distortion that results from composing many fields together without decay. The horizontal axes of the top and bottom row are the same. Scale bars are 2 μm.