Milestone Reached in Brain Mapping Project

[Tyler]

Milestone Reached in Brain Mapping Project
13 June 2012, 6:45 pm

 

A CSH Lab news release says neuroscientists at the Brain Architecture Project have reached an important milestone. They've released the first installment of the 500 terabytes of data from the whole-brain wiring diagram of a mouse brain. The data is in the form of gigapixel whole-brain slice images. It's possible browse through the brain to the desired 20 micron-thick slice, then view the image, zooming it the level of individual neurons. Most importantly, the image data is being released in an open science initiative, freely available for anyone to view and use in their research. The technical approach used was developed by Partha P. Mitra.

"The pragmatic approach Mitra advocated and which is realized in this first data release, is to image whole mouse brains in a semi-automated, quality-controlled process using light microscopy and injected neural tracers (both viruses and classically used tracer substances). While the basic methodology has been available for some time, systematically applying it to a grid of locations spanning the entire brain, and digitizing and re-assembling the resulting collection of brains, is a new approach made feasible by the rapidly falling costs of computer storage."

For more details see the Mouse Brain Architecture Project Technical White Paper. This is just the first step in the overall brain architecture project. After the mouse brain, there's the Human Brain Architecture project which has the potential to do for the human brain what the human genome project did for our genes.

Source: robots.net

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