by Neuroscientists at a Florida university are set to pioneer a technologically advanced method of brain mapping that they believe could help demystify Alzheimer’s disease, autism and related disorders, and provide hope for more effective treatments for traumatic injuries brain.
A team at the University of South Florida’s (USF) auditory and neurodevelopmental laboratory is using virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence to create a high-definition visual timeline of the journey of billions of neurons in the developing brain of newborn mice.
Complex imaging technology provides complex 3D representations of the chronology of early brain formation, which are run through large existing language AI models and analyzed for changes. Rodents have the same types of neurons and connections as humans.
Science is focused on the calyx of Held, the largest nerve terminal in the brains of all mammals, which processes sound. Hearing dysfunction is widely recognized as a source of symptoms in disorders including autism that typically result in social and cognitive impairment.
“The information can help us understand serious developmental disorders that occur when the brain doesn’t develop properly early on,” said Dr. George Spirou, a professor of medical engineering at USF, who compared the images to a road map.
“It’s like you have a route from, say, New York to Chicago, and someone is on a route to Cleveland. You can figure out why there was some off-ramp that shouldn’t have been there, and go back and fix it.
“We may find the keys to some developmental disorders. And in the case of traumatic physical injury or neurological degeneration, is there a way we can develop again?
“If we could trick a part of the brain into thinking it’s developing and needs to grow more synapses, that might be therapeutic. Not completely successful in that area is anyone’s guess, but it certainly looks reasonable.”
VR software created by Spirou, who has more than four decades of experience in brain research, is used to examine the neurons captured in the images, and to analyze the synapses where they connect and communicate. Developing nervous systems have been studied extensively in mammals, but not at this combined level of temporal and spatial resolution, he said.
“Between the fourth and fifth months of pregnancy, the number of neurons in the nervous system is exploding almost exponentially and synapses are created at a rate of around a million per second, an incredible number when you consider that there are almost 100tn synapses in the adult brain. ,” he said.
“The VR platform imports huge amounts of data, and is able to view and understand it in 3D. There’s no way to do it on a 2D screen.”
Spirou said that in addition to having structural similarities to the human brain, newborn mice are used for research because they provide a kind of microcosm of human behavior.
“At two days of age, the nerve terminal begins to grow, at four days it is growing, and at six days of age, it is the most grown,” he said.
“What the brain does is like a game of musical chairs. Neurons over-innervate and then clipping occurs, like taking a chair out and someone out of the game. By six days of age, most of that trimming takes place, and by nine days of age it is all set as it will be in adulthood.
“Mice are born very prematurely, so that the first week or so in a mouse is equivalent to time in utero in humans.”
The USF project, conducted in collaboration with scientists at the University of California at San Diego, Oregon Health & Science University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was partially funded by a $3.3m grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). ).
In 2013, then-President Barack Obama announced an ambitious human brain mapping effort called the Brain Initiative (advancing brain research through innovative neurotechnologies), pledging an initial $100m in federal funds to distributed through the NIH and the National Science Foundation.
More than a decade of progress in neurological research followed, which was demonstrated outside the de facto federal umbrella. Privately funded experiments have gained experience in recent years and months, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, in which a paralyzed patient was able to control a computer with a chip implanted in his brain, before complications arose.
“Other companies are doing the same, and even better, and studying the human brain tissue taken from neurosurgical procedures, that’s a new generation. [of research]but on adults,” said Spirou.
“Maybe the time frame we’re looking at, actually four-fifths, into six months of gestation, we’re not there yet. It creates a lot of issues and you wouldn’t want to take a healthy position and do an experiment that could change the development trajectory.
“So what we’re doing with these mouse models is the best approach for the time being. What happens in science is that it becomes clearer and clearer what you don’t know, and this is a growing field.”
