A fragment of the human brain, less than the size of a grain of rice, has been reconstructed in 3D and mapped for the first time. Researchers from Harvard University and Google Research succeeded after 10 years of work. The study was published in ‘Science’. The size of the fragment is one square millimetre, which may be very small, but it contains 57 thousand cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels and 150 million synapses, which in ‘big data’ terms means 1,400 terabytes of data to analyse. The 3D reconstruction shows “with detailed realism every cell” of the human brain “and its network of neural connections in a piece of human temporal cortex about half the size of a grain of rice,” the study reads.
Today we therefore have the extremely complex ‘wiring’ of the mammalian brain. In fact, the researchers subjected each section of this fragment to analysis via an electron microscope, obtaining hundreds of millions of images which were then ‘stitched’ together to obtain the three-dimensional map.
The ultimate goal of the collaboration between Harvard and Google Research, supported by the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Initiative, is to create a high-resolution map of the neural “wiring” of a mouse’s entire brain. An undertaking that “would involve analyzing approximately 1,000 times the amount of data just produced by the millimetric fragment of human cortex”, the researchers point out. “The word fragment is ironic – explained Jeff Lichtman of Harvard University – A Terabyte is, for most people, a gigantic quantity, yet a fragment of a human brain – just a tiny piece of a human brain – is still thousands of terabytes”.
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