One way to use artificial intelligence (AI) is to help researchers understand huge amounts of data, including science and medicine. Google researchers and Harvard neurobiologists have united to create an unprecedented view of the human brain that could help better understand neurological disorders and answer fundamental questions about how our brain works.
By combining brain visualization with processing and analysis of artificial intelligence, researchers have reconstructed almost every cell and all its connections in a small volume of human brain tissue that is about half the size of a rice grain.
Although this image is of an extremely small area of the brain, the 3D visualization required a massive 1.4 petabytes (1.4 million gigabytes) of disk space for processing.
Experts provided individual access to this visualization so that anyone, without super-powerful scientific equipment, could familiarize themselves with the advancements in artificial intelligence, expanding their horizons and potentially confirming or refuting their own ideas about the brain’s structure.
The piece of brain tissue used by the researchers, taken from the anterior temporal lobe of a woman suffering from epilepsy, was removed by surgeons to access the desired brain area. This particular piece became the focus of the scientists’ research.
A tiny sample of brain tissue measuring one cubic millimeter contained roughly 50,000 cells and about 150 million synapses – the connection points through which signals are transmitted between neurons.
Some pairs of neurons exhibited a remarkable property of being strongly connected to each other through as many as 50 synapses, puzzling researchers as to the reason behind this phenomenon.
The image showcases all neurons of the same type, excitatory neurons, with larger ones depicted in red and smaller ones in blue. The cells’ nuclei measure approximately 15-30 micrometers in diameter.
An intriguing discovery during the reconstruction process was the observation of clusters of cells that exhibited a tendency to mirror each other. The image provided shows a particularly symmetrical pair.
Neurons in the brain are intricately connected. Below is an individual neuron (white) with over 5,000 axons (depicted in blue) from other neurons for signal transmission, and a similar number of synapses (shown in green) facilitating the signal passage from the axons to the receiving neuron.