Collaborative Digital Brain Mapping Comes of Age

[thanatos4]

Collaborative Digital Brain Mapping Comes of Age

 

 

Online geomapping services, exemplified by Google Maps, provide high-resolution satellite maps to anyone with an internet connection and have set the standard for online digital mapping. We are now beginning to witness similar digital mapping technologies spilling over into non-related fields, one of the more interesting of which is neuroscience and the collaborative digital mapping of the brain.

 

Launched less than a year ago, BrainMaps broke new ground through its application of digital geomapping technologies to brain mapping. Today, it remains the sole site devoted to online collaborative digital brain mapping. With several terabytes of ultra high-resolution brain image data, consisting of several dozen mouse, monkey, cat, and human brains, its online brain image database is the largest available. This collection of image data is integrated with structural information regarding spatial locations of different brain areas and the relations between them. And in the collaborative spirit, online users can add their own labels and annotations, and place landmarks throughout the digital brains they explore. Users may also post their images, landmarks, and other annotations in the BrainMaps forum, a place where brain explorers come together to share the fruits of their brain explorations in the spirit of discovery.

 

One of the main features of the site is a Flash-based high-resolution image viewer which communicates with a MySQL database and the server through PHP and XML. This image viewer can be used to rapidly and intuitively navigate through multi-terapixel sized images. Annotations, labels, and other images may be placed in transparent layers above the primary image data, and may be toggled on and off. The navigation within each image is similar to navigation with Google Maps or MSN Virtual Earth, except that, instead of a single large image to contend with (the earth), there are thousands, each one representing a slice through the brain. Navigation through the brain slices in 3D is also available, but currently only as a downloadable Windows or Mac desktop application that utilizes OpenGL and is written in C.

 

The U.S.-sponsored 'Decade of the Brain' has come and gone; it officially ended in the year 2000. It would take another five years before BrainMaps.org came onto the scene; it encapulates what the Decade of the Brain was aiming towards: Collaborative digital brain mapping and a resource available to everyone with an internet connection.

[thanatos4]

We are witnessing a renaissance in brain science and technology. Science is examining the brain in ever increasing detail to discern important components of brain structure and function, all of it leading to a reverse engineering of the brain. Within the last year alone, two websites devoted to detailed brain mapping have emerged, BrainMaps.org and the Allen Brain Atlas. On BrainMaps.org, visitors may explore high resolution images of whole human and primate brains, seeing every neuron and every neuron process in vivid detail. Offering a different view of things, the Allen Brain Atlas is aiming to have online detailed maps of gene expression for all 20,000 or so genes in the mouse brain completed within the next year; they are currently at 6,000. We are now at a unique point in history where the brain is no longer viewed as a 'black box', but now, anyone with an internet connection can view every single detail of brain structure online. We are post-'Decade of the Brain'. We are entering the 'Decade of Reverse Engineering the Brain'.