CHENNAI: The brains of five fetuses, aged between 14 and 24 weeks, were sliced into 20-micron slices, less than half the thickness of a human hair. IIT Madras Creating a detailed three-dimensional atlas of over 5,000 images using indigenous technology at about one-tenth the cost of research in Western countries. Scientists say the atlas will take scientists and doctors several steps closer to understanding the most complex organ in the human body that controls thoughts and emotions.
“No one has ever looked at the brain so closely,” said Professor Mohansankar Sivaprakasam. IIT-MSudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Center, which created these high-resolution images. His goal was to create a detailed map of the human brain to better understand its structure and function. “This will open up avenues for diagnosis and treatment of various diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and stroke. Therefore, we decided that the atlas should remain open source,” he said.
The center acquired more than 200 brains, both normal and diseased, and processed at least 70 of them into a cellular-resolution digital volume dataset, using the center’s high-throughput imaging platform for Dharani. The researchers identified and labeled more than 500 brain regions, and the findings were accepted for publication in the 132-year-old peer-reviewed Journal of Comparative Neurology. The idea to create high-resolution 3D images of the brain came in 2015 after a conversation with former student and Infosys co-founder Chris Gopalakrishnan, who realized that it would not only help cure diseases, but also artificial intelligence and machine learning. It will also add insight into research on learning. “We must understand intelligence from a human perspective to build a better AI,” said Gopalakrishnan, one of the funders.
“Dharani is the largest publicly accessible digital dataset of the human fetal brain, created with less than a tenth of the initial funding that Alan Braine did,” said Dr. Susanna Herculano Hozel, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Comparative Neurology. Atlas powered. The cost of creating the Allen Brain Atlas is $150-$200 million compared to $15 million for the Indian data set.