From the whitepaper [1]:<p><pre><code> After an appropriate transport period, the brain is
perfused, sectioned, suitably stained, and each section
digitally imaged. These 2-D images are co-registered into a
3-D computer stack that is subsequently registered to a
common reference atlas. The resulting 3-D brain image is
largely unlabeled (i.e., contains no signal of interest),
except for the connections between the injected region and
its target regions. Thus the labeled connections are
clearly identifiable. A given region is injected in
multiple animals to account for individual variability.
</code></pre>
They do two passes, in each pass they stain mouse brain cells in a particular region, then they kill the mouse, slice its brain, and image the slices. While this method certainly works well on mice (I've seen surgical work done of mice first hand, neat stuff), sadly it doesn't quite scale up to imaging the human brain. But having all those (petabytes) of data has gotta be worth something.<p>[1] <a href="http://brainarchitecture.org/mouse/documentation/project-white-paper" rel="nofollow">http://brainarchitecture.org/mouse/documentation/project-whi...</a>
The title is a little misleading. What they've done is effectively created hundreds of snapshots of neural connectivity, each focusing on how one particular region of the brain hooks into another. The goal is to make this data available so experts and hobbyists alike can potentially identify connections that offer insight into brain function and disease.<p>An analogy would be trying to reconstruct the street layout of a city by taking pictures from a plane as it flew over. Each time you fly past, you might get a different angle, different weather conditions, or try a different camera. Now you have hundreds of photos, and you are hoping people who know things about cities will find useful information there, like where the best restaurants might be located.<p>Disclosure: I worked on the front-facing side of this project (data browser and image viewer).
Great project, and especially great that the data is available for public study!<p>I'm not keen on the article title though. 'Scientists trace a wiring plan...' sounds like it has been done already (present tense in news articles tends to read this way), which is completely false - as work on the 'wiring plan' has hardly even begun. I didn't expect Nature would be so 'headliney'...
I've written a blog post once, dreaming about having a backup of my brain put on S3 and working as a programmer on(in?) a EC2 instance to earn enough money to keep Amazon from (killing?) discontinuing the service for me.
Now I see that this is much closer to reality than I thought.<p>Interesting how young programmers would compete with a guy who can work 24/7 and have 250 years of professional experience...
Somewhat related: There is a crowdsourced project to clean up data for neuronal connections visible in sections of mouse retina:<p><a href="http://eyewire.org/" rel="nofollow">http://eyewire.org/</a>
I believe this is the future of AI research. Once we could map all components of a mouse brain to their logic software equivalents and then let this simulation run, we could make significant steps towards learning what intelligence in animals really constitutes. I believe the current images of the mouse brain are yet insufficient to derive a logical circuitry from, but I'm sure that will be possible in time.
I have a question about this, I know that we have a complete wiring diagram of all 302 neurons in the <i>C. elegans</i> nervous system, so are we able to simulate that neural network and see the same behaviours as in the living nematode worm? I've seen papers that's focused on the locomotion circuit and other parts but I don't seem to be able to find any attempts at simulating the whole thing at once.
Sharing the images is great, but they are of little use without segmentation. The macroconnectome describes connections between regions. How are people supposed to collaborate if everybody comes up with a different way of overlaying atlas regions on each brain slice?<p>The Nature article is a bit too optimistic. Just because we can establish semi-quantitative connectivity levels between cortical regions with varying degrees of accuracy (many things can go wrong when injecting the tracer) it doesn't mean that a complete map of cell level connectivity is just around the corner. Hell, we disregard electrical synapses completely right now...