The NIH has designated the mouse as a model organism for investigating the nervous system due to its usefulness in neuroscience research.

Development of the Mouse Cochlea Database (MCD) provides a web-based repository of comprehensive image data on the mouse cochlea and morphometric software tools that can be used to analyze these images. The overall goal of this project is to improve our understanding of hearing by facilitating collaboration and multidisciplinary research using a neuroinformatics approach.

The MCD contains two types of image resources: serial 2D image stacks using a nondestructive optical sectioning method, and 3D reconstructions of cochlear structures.