As the animal grows and ages, they can also watch how the neurons change connections.Īnother technique uses the ATLUM, or automatic tape-collecting lathe ultramicrotome. By generating images of the animal's brain, scientists can see where and how neurons connect to each other. One such technique, known as Brainbow, labels every neuron in a live animal's brain a different color. Read on to learn how researchers map the brain. Researchers must collect images of the brain, turn those images into data, and then use that data to analyze what happens in the brain as it develops. Scientists are still developing the parts that might form this massive map.īrain mapping is a collection of many different tools. It could show us our whole brain all the regions, functional lobes, specialized centers, thick neuron "bundles" connecting brain parts, neuron circuits, single neurons, junctions between neurons and finally, neuron parts. A complete structural map of our brain might be similar. Google Earth shows us satellite images of our planet and zooms in to continents, countries, states, cities, highways, streets and buildings. Brain mapping also examines what goes wrong physically in the brain during mental illnesses and other brain diseases.įinally, brain mapping aims to give us a thorough picture of our brain's structure. It examines how our environment changes our brain's structure by studying, for instance, how the brain changes physically through the learning and aging processes. Now, can we look in the vision section and say, Is there a special part of the brain that detects red objects and another that detects green objects? Or does the same area detect objects of both colors?īrain mapping also looks from the outside in. These atlases have been publicly released on NITRIC ( ) and can be readily used by brain imaging researchers interested in studying brainstem pathways.There's part of the brain that has to do primarily with vision and other parts that have to do primarily with sound. In our experimental results, we demonstrate that our method yielded anatomically faithful reconstruction of the brainstem pathways and achieved improved performance in comparison with an existing atlas of cerebellar peduncles based on HCP data. Finally, we leveraged our novel connectome modeling techniques including high order fiber orientation distribution (FOD) reconstruction from multi-shell diffusion imaging and topography-preserving tract filtering algorithms to successfully reconstruct the 23 fiber bundles for each subject, which were then used to calculate the probabilistic atlases in the MNI152 space for public release. After that, we developed a systematic protocol to manually delineate 1300 ROIs on 20 HCP subjects (10 males 10 females) for the reconstruction of fiber bundles using tractography techniques. For the large-scale data from the 500-Subject release of HCP, we conducted extensive quality controls to exclude subjects with severe distortions in the brainstem area. To overcome these limitations, we develop in this work a probabilistic atlas of 23 major brainstem bundles using high-quality HCP data passing rigorous quality control. They were also limited in the lack of adequate consideration of subject variability in either fiber pathways or region of interests (ROIs) used for bundle reconstruction. Previous works relying on HCP data to study brainstem pathways, however, did not consider the prevalence (>80%) of large distortions in the brainstem even after the application of correction procedures from the HCP-Pipeline. With the release of high-resolution data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), there is increasing interest in mapping human brainstem pathways. While diffusion MRI has been successfully applied to map various brain pathways, its application for the in vivo imaging of the brainstem pathways has been limited due to inadequate resolution and large susceptibility-induced distortion artifacts. As a primary relay center, the fiber pathways of the brainstem include efferent and afferent connections among the cerebral cortex, spinal cord, and cerebellum. The brainstem is a critical structure that regulates vital autonomic functions, houses the cranial nerves and their nuclei, relays motor and sensory information between the brain and spinal cord, and modulates cognition, mood, and emotions.