How to apply ACE to the HMBA basal ganglia consensus taxonomy

**Note: These videos were created May 2025 and may not include the most recent feature or data set updates.**

Annotation Comparison Explorer (ACE) is an R Shiny and web-based tool for comparison of annotations such as (i) cell type assignments, (ii) donor metadata (e.g., donor, sex, age), and (iii) cell metadata (e.g., anatomic location, QC metrics). Two primary use cases are (1) comparing user-defined clustering results and mapping results (e.g., after running MapMyCells) for the same set of cells and (2) comparing cell type names between different taxonomies on Allen Brain Map. Additionally, ACE includes a data set comparing cell type names and associated abudance changes between multiple published studies of Alzheimer's disease in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (see visualizations far below).

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ACE Use Case Videos

The remainder of this page includes five short how-to videos describing how to find the HMBA Basal Ganglia taxonomy on ACE and what to do once you've found it for common use cases.

Data Access

This video describes how to access the BG taxonomy on ACE.


Filter data

This video describes how to filter data to only include a subset of cells.


Comparing Annotations

This video describes how to compare pairs of annotations using an interactive confusion matrix.


Explore an individual annotation

This video describes how to how cells mapping to a single BG group align to the adult human and adult mouse brain atlases (and other metadata).


Other features

This video briefly describes other features of ACE, including scatter plots, river plots, and image download.