“Today, mapping the human brain at the synaptic level might seem inconceivable. And doing so for the much larger human brain is becoming a legitimate long-term goal. Many researchers now think that mapping the entire mouse brain - about 500 cubic millimetres in volume - might be possible in the next decade. “Five years ago, it felt overly ambitious to be thinking about a cubic millimetre,” Reid says. Using current imaging technology, it would take dozens of microscopes, working around the clock, thousands of years just to collect the data required for such an endeavour.īut advances in microscopy, as well as the development of more powerful computers and algorithms for image analysis, have propelled the field of connectomics forwards at a pace that has surprised even those involved. The human brain has 10 15 connections and contains roughly the same number of neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way, around 100 billion. The ultimate achievement in this area - a nanoscale connectome of a whole human brain - is still a long way off. Neuroscientists think that these efforts will give them unparalleled insights into how neural circuits encode information and direct behaviour - in short, how brains work. The mouse-brain cubic-millimetre project is just one of several attempts in various species to map a nanoscale connectome - a wiring diagram of the nervous system with synapse-level detail. More than 30 years of satellite images of Earth, collected by the Landsat missions, take up only about 1.3 petabytes, which makes the mouse-brain images almost “a world in a grain of sand”, says Clay Reid, a neurobiologist at the Allen Institute, quoting English poet William Blake.
The balloons proclaim the size of the completed data set, spelling out “2PB” (2 petabytes, which is equivalent to 2 million gigabytes) in blue and silver letters.
Human brain mapping submit manuscript software#
Then, software developed by the institute’s computer scientists took about three months to assemble the images into a single 3D volume.
The microscopes ran continuously for five months, collecting more than 100 million images of 25,000 slices of mouse visual cortex, each just 40 nanometres thick.