14 DAY TRIAL // A paper published in June 20's issue of the journal Science details how an international team of researchers succeeded in rolling out the most detailed map of the human brain that science has seen up until now.
Long story short, what these researchers did was take the brain of a 65-year-old woman and map it in 3D in its entirety.
The resulting atlas, nicknamed “BigBrain” by the neuroscientists who worked on developing it, is expected to help shed new light on the make-up of several brain regions, Nature reports.
This is because it shows the human brain at a resolution of 20 micrometers.
Commenting on his and his fellow researchers' achievement, study co-author Alan Evans of the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University in Canada stated as follows:
“This [the atlas] completely changes the game in terms of our ability to discriminate very fine structural and physiological properties of the human brain.”
The same source informs us that, in order to create this 3D map of the human brain, the scientists first had to slice the 65-year-old woman's brain into a whopping 7,400 slices.
Each of these slices was thinner than a human hair.
The researchers then used supercomputers to create virtual analogues of the brain slices and recreate a three-dimensional version of the human brain.
While stacking these slices one over the other in virtual reality, they had to always keep an eye open for any tears and wrinkles that might result and might need correcting.
All in all, an impressive 10 trillion bytes of data were generated.
Despite the fact that this atlas shows the make-up of just one individual's brain, specialists say that it counts as one very important step forward in terms of bettering our understanding of this organ.
“Getting a really accurate map in one individual is, I think, very valuable,” neurobiologist David Van Essen argued.
The scientists who worked on this project are presently working on rolling out a second such map of another brain.