$1.2 Billion Human Brain Project That Blows Your Mind

I bet our fucking failures of stroke associations are not intimately involved in this project. That would require actual hard work and a thinking brain.
http://scitechconnect.elsevier.com/1-billion-human-brain-project-blows-your-mind/
As a society living in a 21^st century, we have just begun to realize how little do we know about our brain. We desperately need to understand how our brain works, so we can develop new treatments for different mental and neurological disorders. This has become one of the greatest challenges in modern science.
Computing technologies represent some kind of new hope in this quest for better understanding of our three-pound pink organ, that is why lately the Human Brain Project (HBP) is grabbing all the media attention in the Neuroscience sphere.
The HBP is a €1.2 billion worth and 10 years long global project that will give us a deeper and more meaningful understanding of how the human brain operates. It is comprised of 130 research institutions throughout Europe and coordinated through the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EFPL) in Switzerland (1).
Experimental mapping of the brain turned out to be a dead end, given that it takes 20,000 experiments to map just one neural circuit and that our brain consists of 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses. The HBP came up with a better solution by building the first human brain model. These are neuromorphic computing systems which use the same basic principles of computation and cognitive architectures as the brain (1, 2, 3, 4).
The plan is to determine fundamental principles of how neurons are connected and use those principles to construct statistical simulations. A simulation model will then predict how the certain parts of the brain, for which we have none or little experimental information, are wired and then compare the results with real biological data. In other words, the idea is to find some underlying principle that governs brain’s morphology and reverse-engineer the human brain with the help of supercomputers (1, 2, 3).

Nevertheless, the grand plan of creating a perfect brain model does not stop here. Henry Markram, neuroscientist and co-director of this ambitious project, envisions this feat even a step further. He wants to unite the brain simulation with a medical informatics platform. This means all the available clinical data on mental diseases from public hospitals and pharmaceutical companies would be integrated in the simulation model. This way, experts could systematically study healthy subjects and patients with various conditions and draw some empirical correlations between mental diseases and biological causes. “The final stage would be to use this new biologically grounded classification system to develop new diagnostic tools and suggest strategies for drug development and treatment” explains Markram (3).
A project director also thinks of connecting the brain simulation with a robot, where the robot would be able to see and hear its environment. Researchers could then introduce distortions to the simulation to mimic for exp. an autistic brain and examine an autist’s experience of the world. This would definitely represent a huge breakthrough in Medical informatics and also in Informatics in general (1, 3).
Understanding the brain is vital, not just for diagnosing and treating brain diseases but also for the development of new brain-like technologies such as neurorobotics and neuromorphic computing. These brain-like technologies can bring us new tools and methods to study plasticity of the brain and to develop embodied neural systems in artificial software and hardware devices, machines, robots, etc. In order to achieve this, we also have toexplore new computing architectures that mimic biological neural structures with the purpose of achieving the computational capabilities of such systems with similar volume and energy efficiency (5).
These are all the challenges that scientists working on Human Brain Project still have to overcome. In the meantime, the whole world remains in restless expectation of their new discoveries that will reveal how the most complex organ in our body works.
By Blazka Orel, Msc, BioSistemika LLC

Researchers Say They’ve Recreated Part of a Rat Brain Digitally

In the article you can read about the naysayers whom obviously are not among the 10 million stroke survivors a year needing answers as to how the brain works.  I don't give a shit that this is a BHAG(Big Hairy Audacious Goal). If we don't put these goals out there we just plod along doing nothing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/science/rat-brain-digital-reconstruction-human-brain-project.html

Building on years of research, 82 researchers from institutions around the world reported Thursday that they had built a reconstruction of a section of a rat brain in a computer.

The research was partly supported by the Human Brain Project, a more than $1 billion, 10-year European research program. The report comes directly from the Blue Brain Project, which aims to reconstruct the rat brain and eventually the human brain in a computer.

Both research programs have been controversial. Hundreds of neuroscientists signed an open letter in 2014(naysayers here) criticizing both the overall project and the feasibility of the reconstruction goal.

Henry Markram, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, who leads both projects, said that what he and his many colleagues had achieved was the first draft of a functioning map of 30,000 brain cells.

Continue reading the main story

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He said this was not yet a proof of principle that scientists could indeed reconstruct the human brain, which contains 85 billion or more neurons, but that it was a first step.

Cori Bargmann, co-director of the new Kavli Neural Systems Institute at Rockefeller University, who has been intimately involved with the Brain Initiative, also a long-term research program, said the report represented an “amazing tour de force” in its accumulation of data.

But, she said, the “simulations are in their infancy,” and therefore what this means for the larger goals of reconstructing a whole brain is unclear. “They built a 747, and it’s taxiing around the runway,” she said. “I haven’t seen it fly yet, but it’s promising.”

The reconstruction that Dr. Markram envisions is a research tool that would digitally encode some characteristics of neurons and their connections that are common to all brains. It is not the futuristic dream of uploading a human personality to a computer.

To build a digital version of the portion of rat brain, researchers did not record the details of every single cell. They used the data from some cells to inform what the whole would look like. Then they simulated certain kinds of brain activity and found that the reconstruction acted like the living tissue. All the data for the reconstruction will be available for other scientists.

The report, published in Cell, a scientific journal, is one of the longest neuroscience reports ever, and several neuroscientists declined to comment before publication because of the time required to evaluate it fully.

First micro-structure atlas of the human brain completed

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

$40 million awarded to trace human brain's connections

Over a year old but we need to know how our brain uses connections in order to be able to come up with solutions to reconnect it.
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/news_and_events/news_articles/Connectome-Sept-2010.htm
The National Institutes of Health today awarded grants totaling $40 million to map the human brain’s connections in high resolution. Better understanding of such connectivity promises improved diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders.
The grants are the first awarded under the Human Connectome Project (http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jul2009/ninds-15.htm). They will support two collaborating research consortia. The first will be led by researchers at Washington University, St. Louis, and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. The other will be led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)/Harvard University, Boston, and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
“We’re planning a concerted attack on one of the great scientific challenges of the 21st. Century,” explained Washington University’s Dr. David Van Essen, Ph.D., who co-leads one of the groups with Minnesota’s Kamil Ugurbil, Ph.D. “The Human Connectome Project will have transformative impact, paving the way toward a detailed understanding of how our brain circuitry changes as we age and how it differs in psychiatric and neurologic illness.”
The Connectome projects are being funded by 16 components of NIH under its Blueprint for Neuroscience Research.
“On a scale never before attempted, this highly coordinated effort will use state-of-the-art imaging instruments, analysis tools and informatics technologies – and all of the resulting data will be freely shared with the research community,” said Michael Huerta, Ph.D., of the National Institute of Mental Health, who directs the NIH Connectome initiative. “Individual variability in brain connections underlies the diversity of our thinking, perception and motor skills, so understanding these networks promises advances in brain health.”
The Washington U./Minnesota team will map the connectomes in each of 1,200 healthy adults – twin pairs and their siblings from 300 families. The maps will show the anatomical and functional connections between parts of the brain for each individual, and will be related to behavioral test data. Comparing the connectomes and genetic data of genetically identical twins with fraternal twins will reveal the relative contributions of genes and environment in shaping brain circuitry and pinpoint relevant genetic variation. The maps will also shed light on how brain networks are organized.
In tooling up for the screening, the researchers will optimize magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners to capture the brain’s anatomical wiring – and its activity, both when participants are at rest and when challenged by tasks. All participants will undergo such structural and functional scans at Washington University. For these, researchers will use a customized MRI scanner with a magnetic field of 3 Tesla. This Connectome Scanner will incorporate new imaging approaches developed by consortium scientists at Minnesota and Advanced MRI Technologies and will provide ten-fold faster imaging times and better spatial resolution.
Additionally, a subset of twin pairs will also be scanned using more powerful 7 and 10.5 Tesla MRI units at the University of Minnesota, which has pioneered the use of such advanced, ultra high magnetic field imaging. For another subset of twins, the scans will be complemented by movies of millisecond brain electrical activity obtained at St. Louis University, using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG).
After processing with sophisticated analysis tools using a supercomputer, the data will become web accessible via a customized Connectome Database Neuroinformatics Platform. All-told, the $30 million five-year project will involve 33 collaborators from nine research centers, including Oxford University, U.K.; Indiana University, Bloomington; University of California, Berkeley; Warwick University, U.K.; University d’Annunzio, Italy; and the Ernst Strungmann Institute, Germany.
Also collaborating with this larger project, the MGH/Harvard-UCLA Connectome consortium will focus on optimizing MRI technology for imaging the brain’s structural connections using diffusion MRI with unprecedented resolution. This way of using a MRI scanner, employed in both projects, maps the brain’s fibrous long distance connections by tracking the motion of water. Different types of tissues are detectable by telltale water diffusion patterns characteristic of different types of cells. So the long extensions of neurons, called white matter, can been seen in sharp relief.
“The MRI scanner system we are assembling will be 4 to 8 times as powerful as conventional systems, enabling imaging of human neuroanatomy with much greater sensitivity than is currently possible,” explained Bruce Rosen, M.D., Ph.D., who is co-directing the project with MGH/Harvard colleague Van Wedeen, M.D., and Arthur Toga, Ph.D., of UCLA.
The planned Connectome Scanner, to be built by Siemens Medical Systems for this project, is the first of a new class of MRI instruments. It will boost resolving power while also shortening the scan times required to image each subject, Rosen said.
The MGH/Harvard team has pioneered the use of a diffusion MRI technique called Diffusion Spectrum Imaging (DSI) to create stunning maps of neural fibers crisscrossing the brain. DSI offers a higher resolution, more multidimensional view than an older technique called Diffusion Tensor Imaging. This makes it possible, for example, to see the different orientations of multiple neural fibers that cross at a single location.
“Today we know less about the connectivity of the human brain than about a dozen other species,” said Wedeen. “Learning more about variation in our own brain’s connections will lay the groundwork for using brain imaging measures of connectivity as an aid in diagnosis.”
"Creating these maps requires sophisticated statistical and visual informatics approaches,” added UCLA’s Toga. “Understanding the similarities and differences in these maps among sub-populations will improve our understanding of human brain in health and disease."
Supported by an $8.5 million grant over three years, the project will scan healthy adults, including some participants from the other consortia’s project. Data and research know-how will also be shared across the two projects.

Image Caption: Diffusion spectrum image shows brain wiring in a healthy human adult. The thread-like structures are nerve bundles, each containing hundreds of thousands of nerve fibers. Source: Source: Van J. Wedeen, M.D., MGH/Harvard U.