Hola amigos: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., la Fundación Nacional de Ciencias de Los Estados Unidos, nos alcanza la información sobre un análisis extremo de un cerebro grande; ellos nos dicen que :
"Es difícil desentrañar los misterios del cerebro cuando el equipo se congela.
Para ayudar a los investigadores del cerebro frustrados, un equipo multidisciplinario de científicos de la Universidad de Utah ha creado un método más rápido para generar y explorar de alta resolución, imágenes en 3-D del cerebro.
Alessandra Angelucci, neurocientífico del Centro Oftalmológico Moran en el Departamento de Oftalmología de Utah cuya investigación es financiada por la National Science Foundation (NSF), dice que la herramienta permite a ella ya sus colegas a visualizar mejor las complejas conexiones entre las neuronas.
"Sabemos que la función cerebral surge de la actividad de las redes neuronales", dice Angelucci. "Para entender cómo funciona el cerebro, lo que necesitamos saber cómo es por cable."
Para ayudar a los investigadores del cerebro frustrados, un equipo multidisciplinario de científicos de la Universidad de Utah ha creado un método más rápido para generar y explorar de alta resolución, imágenes en 3-D del cerebro.
Alessandra Angelucci, neurocientífico del Centro Oftalmológico Moran en el Departamento de Oftalmología de Utah cuya investigación es financiada por la National Science Foundation (NSF), dice que la herramienta permite a ella ya sus colegas a visualizar mejor las complejas conexiones entre las neuronas.
"Sabemos que la función cerebral surge de la actividad de las redes neuronales", dice Angelucci. "Para entender cómo funciona el cerebro, lo que necesitamos saber cómo es por cable."
More inforamtion....
Interactive software tool lets brain researchers explore large-scale, high-res imaging to better understand connections in the brain
 Credit and Larger Version |
It's tough to unravel the mysteries of the brain when your computer is frozen.
To aid frustrated brain researchers, a multidisciplinary team of
scientists at the University of Utah has created a faster method for
generating and exploring high-resolution, 3-D images of the brain.
Alessandra Angelucci, a neuroscientist with the Moran Eye Center at Utah's Ophthalmology Department whose research is funded
by the National Science Foundation (NSF), says the tool allows her and
her colleagues to better visualize the complex connections between
neurons.
"We know that brain function emerges from the activity of neural
networks," Angelucci says. "To understand how the brain works, we need
to know how it is wired."
The work by the Utah team is part of a movement across the scientific
community to come up with new ways to use and analyze information.
Scientific instruments ranging from brain scanners, to microscopes, to
telescopes are increasingly improving and generating larger amounts of
high-quality data, creating the need for more efficient data-processing approaches.
"This is really an extreme big data project," says Cameron
Christensen, a Utah computer scientist on a team led by Valerio Pascucci
at the SCI Institute
at Utah, who created the new method at the Center for Extreme Data
Management Analysis and Visualization. Pascucci and his team are funded by NSF's PetaApps program, designed to accelerate discovery through petascale simulations and analysis.
"We're living in a time of extreme big data. This tool could have
applications for astronomy, climate change and other fields," says
Christensen.
Big data tools are vital to advance our understanding of the brain,
universe and other topics, as evidenced by national efforts such as The BRAIN Initiative.
New method
The tool is a new twist on an existing technology.
The technology, known as Visualization Streams for Ultimate
Scalability (ViSUS), turns massive quantities of digital data into
visual information that the human mind can understand. ViSUS has been
used for years in several different areas of research, including clean energy simulations on high performance computing platforms.
The software
processes terascale-sized datasets in a way that allows researchers to
explore the images interactively. The typical laptop has about 4-15
gigabytes of memory. One terabyte has 1,000 times that much. That's
doable for a supercomputer, but not a grad student's Mac.
"Previously, if you wanted to interact with this volume of data, you couldn't. Everything would freeze," Christensen says.
Think of the desk-smacking frustration involved in trying to open an
image file 1,000 times greater than your computer can handle.
This is a frustration brain researchers know well.
A whole mouse brain is about 31 terabytes of imaging data. That is same amount of data as about 32 million digital photographs.
The visual cortex of the macaque brain, which Angelucci studies, is 318 terabytes.
"We call these 'terror-bytes,'" said Terry Sejnowski of the Salk
Institute for Biological Sciences, a computational neuroscientist who
moderated the Society for Neuroscience press conference at which the findings were announced.
The new approach developed by Pascucci's team to handle these
terror-bytes is hierarchical, loading images of increasing resolution as
the user clicks to see more details.
"It's a little like Google Maps, where you zoom in and in. Except
with our technique, you don't reload all the data each time. You only download
the differences between levels, so it's faster and requires less
memory," he says. "Therefore, it opens the possibility of dealing with
3-D microscopy volumes instead of just 2-D maps."
Millimeters of brain
Angelucci and her colleagues used the technology to stream 3-D images of a primate's visual cortex.
They paired this tool with a neuroscience technique called CLARITY, which makes surrounding brain tissue transparent. (CLARITY was developed by NSF-funded researchers in 2013.)
"The development of CLARITY made our lives much easier," said
postdoctoral fellow and neuroscientist Frederick Federer, who works with
Angelucci. "But the datasets couldn't load on our computers."
The team is now developing automated ways to trace the connections
between neurons in the images, and to make the new interface accessible
for other researchers.
"New biological techniques paired with computational approaches are
opening up new multidisciplinary opportunities to advance brain
research," Federer says.
-NSF-
Media Contacts
Sarah Bates, NSF, (703) 292-7738, sabates@nsf.gov
Related WebsitesNSF Understanding the Brain: http://nsf.gov/brain
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal
agency that supports fundamental research and education across all
fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2015, its budget
is $7.3 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly
2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions. Each year, NSF
receives about 48,000 competitive proposals for funding, and makes about
11,000 new funding awards. NSF also awards about $626 million in
professional and service contracts yearly.
http://www.nsf.gov/news/
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Researchers paired the tool with the CLARITY technique for 3-D brain visualization.
Credit and Larger Version
A whole mouse brain is about 31 terabytes of imaging data, about 32 million digital photographs.
Credit and Larger Version
The ViSUS technology provides a faster way to view, align and annotate terabyte-scale data.
Credit and Larger Version
The tool is a new twist on an existing software technology.
Credit and Larger Version
The National Science Foundation (NSF)
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achuteguiayabaca@gmail.com
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