And with this our doctors need to come up with a stroke protocol to recover the damage to our white matter networks. I'm assuming I lost a good chunk of my white matter underlying my motor and pre-motor cortex. Do we need myelin repair?, axonal sprouting? filopodia searching? dendritic branching?
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=125106&CultureCode=en
A European team of scientists have built the first atlas of
white-matter microstructure in the human brain. The project’s final
results have the potential to change the face of neuroscience and
medicine over the coming decade.
The work relied on groundbreaking MRI technology and was funded by
the EU’s future and emerging technologies program with a grant of 2.4
million Euros. The participants of the project, called CONNECT, were
drawn from leading research centers in countries across Europe including
Israel, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Denmark, Switzerland and
Italy.
The project investigators met today in Paris, after 3 years of
research, to announce the conclusion of the project and present a report
of their findings.
The new atlas combines three-dimensional images from the MRI scans of
100 brains of volunteers. To achieve this, CONNECT developed advanced
MRI methods providing unprecedented detail and accuracy.
Professor Daniel Alexander, a CONNECT steering committee member from
the UCL Department of Computer Science said: "The UCL team use the
latest computer modelling algorithms and hardware to invent new imaging
techniques. The techniques we devised were key to realising the new
CONNECT brain atlas."
"The imaging techniques reveal new information about brain structure
that help us understand how low-level cellular architecture relate to
high-level thought processes."
Currently, biomedical research teams around the world studying brain
science rely on a brain atlas produced by painstaking and destructive
histological methods on the brains of a few individuals who donated
their bodies to science.
The new atlas simulates the impossible process of painstakingly
examining every mm2 of brain tissue (of which there are around 100
million per brain) with a microscope, while leaving the brain in tact.
The key novelty in the atlas is the mapping of microscopic features
(such as average cell size and packing density) within the white matter,
which contains the neuronal fibers that transmit information around the
living brain. The results of the project, obtained through advanced
image processing techniques, provide new depth and accuracy in our
understanding of the human brain in health and disease.
The atlas describes the brain's microstructure in standardized space,
which enables non-expert users, such as physicians or medical
researchers, to exploit the wealth of knowledge it contains. The atlas
contains a variety of new images that represent different microscopic
tissue characteristics, such as the fiber diameter and fiber density
across the brain, all estimated using MRI. These images will serve as
the reference standard of future brain studies in both medicine and
basic neuroscience.
The project will dramatically facilitate and promote future research
into white matter structure and function. Historically in neuroscience,
the vast majority of research effort has been invested in understanding
and studying gray matter and neurons, while white matter has received
relatively little attention.
This owes largely to the lack of effective research tools to study
white matter, even though it comprises about half the volume of the
brain. The new MRI methods that were developed in CONNECT allow
researchers, for the first time, to visualize the micro-structure of the
living brain over the whole brain.
This opens new realms in our understanding of our most complex organ.
In the future, the project members intend to use the technology they
have developed to study the dynamics and time dependence of the
micro-structure in white matter. For example they will search for a
finger print or a trace that a cognitive task imprints on white matter
microstructure encoding new experiences in the wiring of the brain.
Another future direction is to characterize and understand
micro-structural changes caused by different neurodegenerative diseases,
such as Alzheimer's or schizophrenia, in order to develop better
diagnostic procedures for these and other devastating conditions.
The 69 page report here:
http://www.alphagalileo.org/AssetViewer.aspx?AssetId=68892&CultureCode=en
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