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Brain mapping still sounds like something in a science
fiction movie to me, but it has been listed on Technology
Review's 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2014. Amazingly accurate brain maps
are in fact real.
Neuroscientists try to understand how the brain works on
a detailed level. The newest breakthrough in achieving this goal is a
high-resolution map that shows tiny structures of the human brain.
This breakthrough, part of Europe's Human Brain Project,
took a decade to complete. The international team of researchers sliced a brain
into thousands of thin slices and digitally stitched them back together with
the help of supercomputers. The process allows the scientists to show details
as small as 20 micrometers, roughly the size of many human cells. It is a major
step forward in understanding the brain's three-dimensional anatomy.
The team of researchers, led by Katrin Amunts at the
Jülich Research Centre in Germany, used an MRI machine to image the postmortem
brain of a 65 year-old women. The brain was then cut into ultrathin slices. The
slices were stained and imaged on a flatbed scanner resulting in a total of
7,404 images. Alan Evans and his coworkers at the Montreal Neurological
Institute corrected any defects in the images and aligned each one to its
original position in the brain. The final image was a brain model that can be
used to scrutinize arrangements of cells and tissues.
In the future, further advances may allow scientists to
see the arrangement of cells and nerve fibers inside intact brain tissue at
very high resolution. Several techniques are already being developed but the
challenges are many. Some of the obstacles include the brain tissue itself: the
brain can only be sliced so thin before it becomes too damaged to work with.
Another challenge is the large amounts of data associated with additional high
resolution images, as computers today can't easily navigate such quantities.
Still, this work is an amazing breakthrough for
neuroscientists to better understand how the brain works by studying the
anatomy of a brain on a cellular level.
Sources
Brain
Mapping
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