

Whole human brain mapped in 3D - feelthepain
http://www.nature.com/news/whole-human-brain-mapped-in-3d-1.13245

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akiselev
Shameless plug: 3Scan [1], a company spun off from a university in Arizona (if
I'm not mistaken) and partially funded by Peter Thiel's Breakout Labs grant is
making a robot that is capable of doing this entire procedure with absolutely
minimal human involvement.

They can already do a full 3d map of blood vessels and neurons (with stains)
in a mouse brain within a few days and store it on a TB hard drive (I'm told
an equivalent for the human brain would be a petabyte but their slices might
be thinner). This is a procedure that would take months if not years to do by
hand (they do a full analysis on all of the slices to reproduce a 3d model
afterwards).

This paper was done mostly by hand but soon we'll be able to do it quickly and
automatically.

[1] [http://www.3scan.com/](http://www.3scan.com/)

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thomasjames
Ten TRILLION bytes...

It's okay, Nature, the word terabyte doesn't scare people and is indeed now
part of common parlance...

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andyhmltn
Roughly 9.09495TB for anybody interested

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Pxtl
Now you've done it, this thread is going to collapse into a binary-vs-metric
data measurement flamewar.

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rangibaby
Metric won that war ;-)

[http://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte](http://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte)

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Dylan16807
Wikipedia is not a source~

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SatvikBeri
For proof that Wikipedia is more accurate than other encyclopedias, check out
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia)

(Though seriously, Wikipedia is about as accurate as the Encyclopedia
Brittanica, at least for science articles:
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html))

~~~
Dylan16807
That applies well to en.wikipedia.org, not as much to simple.wikipedia.org.
See my reply to andyhmltn about how the properly researched page disagrees
with the grandparent's link.

Don't trust a wikipedia page that has zero citations.

~~~
SatvikBeri
These are good points and it would be quite helpful if you put them in the
comment next time. "The simple english wikipedia page has these specific
flaws" is substantially more accurate and informative than "Wikipedia is not a
source."

~~~
Dylan16807
Well, if you want to know, my original objection was toward using Wikipedia as
the arbiter of correct stance on a political issue. Wikipedia itself tries to
keep politics out, and for good reason with the way online communities can
groupthink. Clearly I should have expanded on that in the first comment.

I was not aware at that time that Wikipedia actually _contradicted itself_ ,
but that was a very easy way to demonstrate my point in a followup post. But
the particular flaws in that article were never my main point.

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jordigh
Here is part of the software that was used to create this:

[https://github.com/BIC-MNI](https://github.com/BIC-MNI)

as confirmed here:

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2013/06/19/340.6139....](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2013/06/19/340.6139.1472.DC1/Amunts.SM.pdf)

Hell yeah, free science requires free software!

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alexjeffrey
I'd love for a neuroscientist to weigh in on this - what is the possibility
that something like this could be used to generate an artificial neural
network which imitates, even crudely, the functions of the human brain?

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networked
>what is the possibility that something like this could be used to generate an
artificial neural network which imitates, even crudely, the functions of the
human brain?

If possible, this would open a huge ethical can of worms: how can we tell such
a simulation is not conscious? Would deleting its runtime data after however
many simulation cycles be tantamount to murder?

Edit: I am not saying that the above concerns should stop us from working
towards developing human brain simulations since the potential benefits of
those are just too great. Rather, it is something we have to have in mind as
they get more complex and closer to the real thing.

~~~
alexjeffrey
I'm not necessarily saying we _should_ create a simulation of the human brain
- just asking whether it would be possible. There are other much more concrete
concerns with creating strong AI too - avoiding accidentally creating a
paperclip maximiser comes to mind:
[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer)

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martindale
The BigBrain dataset is a subject of the NSA's research into graph analysis
[1]. Some sample numbers:

    
    
      - 100 billion vertices, 100 trillion edges
      - 2.08 mNA · bytes^2 (molar bytes) adjacency matrix
      - 2.84 PB adjacency list
      - 2.84 PB edge list
    

[1]:
[http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/2013/slides/big_graph_nsa_rd_2013...](http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/2013/slides/big_graph_nsa_rd_2013_56002v1.pdf)

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dschiptsov
It seems like each brain is unique and it is meaningful to speak only about
"connections" between regions and areas, given that even structure of nerves
are different from person to person.

And, of course, it isn't even near to what we could call a "working model".
Just a mapping of every neuron of some particular brain specimen. No one
understands how it works yet. There are detailed description in textbooks of
how each kind of cells in the brain works, but still can't see the mind among
neurons.))

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31reasons
I am wondering how can you work with a 3D model with a file size of 1 TB ?
Does it require custom software to deal with such a large data ?

EDIT: Perhaps its similar to google maps, where 3D "tiles" are loaded as
required as you zoom in or out.

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thinkmassive
It's kind of like Iron Man 3

