With Michael Huerta (associate director of the National Institute of Mental Health at the time) playing a key role, the NIH Neuroscience Blueprint announced a competition for the Human Connectome Project (HCP), with the overarching objectives of acquiring, analyzing, and freely sharing information about brain circuitry and connectivity gathered by noninvasively imaging healthy young adults. In 2009, leaders at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recognized an opportunity to build on these advances by promoting the systematic characterization of human brain connectivity and its relationship to behavior.
Resting-state fMRI (rfMRI) correlates spontaneous fluctuations in the BOLD signal while subjects lie in the scanner and let their minds wander, to reveal how parts of the brain activate or deactivate together at rest-thereby enabling estimates of “functional connectivity.” Brain imaging studies have typically focused on only one of the above approaches, and it has been challenging to integrate information across approaches and across different studies.Diffusion MRI (dMRI) analyzes diffusion of water molecules within the white matter to infer the orientation of axonal fiber bundles this information can then be used to infer long-distance white matter tracts (tractography) that connect distant gray matter locations, often called “structural connectivity.”.Task-activated functional MRI (tfMRI) reveals which brain regions are relatively more activated or deactivated during performance of behavioral tasks, based on the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) MRI signal, which is modulated by neural activity via a process of neurovascular coupling.Structural MRI provides simple but high-resolution images of the brain, helpful in making geometrical models of brain structures necessary for modern brain imaging analysis and in analyzing subtle aspects of brain architecture, such as the thickness of the cerebral cortex or the amount of neuronal insulation, myelin, within the grey matter.Four main types of MRI are particularly germane here: Among these, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become a workhorse technology because of the diversity of information attainable using the same scanner to acquire images. For human brain studies, many noninvasive neuroimaging methods have emerged in recent decades. Progress in neuroscience has benefited greatly from increasingly powerful methods for acquiring, analyzing, and sharing data. The more we learn, the more we appreciate how much is left to learn. How does a collection of 90 billion neurons interconnected by 150 trillion synapses give rise to the extraordinary capabilities of human behavior and the amazing diversity of talents among the billions of people populating our earth? Recent years have seen exciting progress in addressing these fascinating questions, but achieving a deeper understanding of exactly how the human brain functions and what goes awry in various disorders remains a profoundly demanding endeavor. It was completed in 2003.Understanding the human brain in health and disease represents a grand scientific challenge for the 21st century and beyond. Mapping the human brain is an effort akin to the 13-year Human Genome Project, a global, collaborative research programme whose goal was the complete mapping and understanding of all the genes of human beings. In the United States, former president Barack Obama launched in 2013 the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative while Europe has the Human Brain Project. Our findings could potentially contribute to the effective treatment for increasing important neurodegenerative pathologies such as Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia."Įlsewhere, efforts to map the complex human brain have also been launched. "They will show how neurons are connected and how they interact to result in cognition and intelligence. The images captured with unprecedented speed, clarity and granularity by Synapse will form an extensive human brain map," said Prof Low, who is from the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine's department of pharmacology and department of anaesthesia. What we are setting out to do is a world-first enterprise. "Globally, brain mapping has gained impetus due to the growing impact of brain diseases.
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