A collaborative effort between Harvard and Google has led to a breakthrough in brain science, producing an extensive 3D map of a tiny segment of human brain, revealing complex neural interactions and laying the groundwork for mapping an entire mouse brain. A tiny square contains 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and 150 million synapses, all of which amount to 1,400 terabytes of data. The largest synaptic-resolution, 3D reconstruction of a piece of human brain to date has been created by a Harvard team led by Jeff Lichtman. Neuroscience has technological advances.
In the last decade, Lichtman and his team have collaborated with scientists at Google Research, who use artificial intelligence and electron microscopy to reconstruct the wiring of mammal brains. The paper has three co-first authors, including a former Harvard researcher. The ultimate goal of the collaboration is to create a high-resolution map of a whole mouse brain, which would take about 1,000 times the amount of data they just produced from the human cortex. Insights from the latest brain map.
The word fragment is ironic because it is a tiny fragment of a human brain.
The latest map in Science has never-before-seen details of brain structure, including a powerful set of axons. The team is unsure if the whorls and axons in the sample are normal or pathological.
A comprehensive catalog of brain structure is what connectomics seeks to create. The team has developed a suite of publicly available tools that researchers can use to examine and annotated the connectome.
It was important to present the results in a way that anyone else can benefit from them. The team will tackle the mouse hippocampal formation in order to understand its role in memory and neurological disease. A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex was reconstructed at a resolution of less than a thousandth of a millimeter. There is a science.adk4858