Whole human brain mapped in 3D

[Recursion]

Ten-year 'BigBrain' effort yields 10-trillion-byte atlas of fine-scale cerebral anatomy.

http://www.nature.com/news/whole-human-brain-mapped-in-3d-1.13245

An international group of neuroscientists has sliced, imaged and analysed the brain of a 65-year-old woman to create the most detailed map yet of a human brain in its entirety (see video at bottom). The atlas, called ‘BigBrain’, shows the organization of neurons with microscopic precision, which could help to clarify or even redefine the structure of brain regions obtained from decades-old anatomical studies.

“The quality of those maps is analogous to what cartographers of the Earth offered as their best versions back in the seventeenth century,” says David Van Essen, a neurobiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who was not involved in the study. He says that the new and improved set of anatomical guideposts could allow researchers to merge different types of data — such as gene expression, neuroanatomy and neural activity — more precisely onto specific regions of the brain.

The brain is comprised of a heterogeneous network of neurons of different sizes and with shapes that vary from triangular to round, packed more or less tightly in different areas. BigBrain reveals variations in neuronal distribution in the layers of the cerebral cortex and across brain regions — differences that are thought to relate to distinct functional units.

The atlas was compiled from 7,400 brain slices, each thinner than a human hair. Imaging the sections by microscope took a combined 1,000 hours and generated 10 trillion bytes of data. Supercomputers in Canada and Germany churned away for years reconstructing a three-dimensional volume from the images, and correcting for tears and wrinkles in individual sheets of tissue.

[winter is coming]

1. Republican leadership brains mapped in 1D.

And that's with rounding.


Seriously, thanks for posting a cool article.