MIT’s new Way to map Brain with High Resolution and High Speed
Posted on January 19, 2019
Researchers have developed a new way to image the brain with unprecedented resolution and speed. Using this approach, they can locate individual neurons, trace connections between them, and visualize organelles inside neurons, over large volumes of brain tissue.
Optical and electron microscopy have made tremendous inroads toward understanding the complexity of the brain. However, optical microscopy offersinsufficient resolution to reveal subcellular details, and electron microscopy lacks the throughput and molecular contrast to visualize specific molecular constituents over millimeter-scale or larger dimensions. The Researchers combined expansion microscopy and lattice light-sheet microscopy to image the nanoscale spatial relationships between proteins across the thickness of the mouse cortex or the entire Drosophila brain.
MIT researchers have developed a method to perform large-scale, 3D imaging of brain tissue. Here, they image the entire fruit fly brain.
Imaging expanded tissue samples generates huge amounts of data — up to tens of terabytes per sample — so the researchers also had to devise highly parallelized computational image-processing techniques that could break down the data into smaller chunks, analyze it, and stitch it back together into a coherent whole.
The researchers demonstrated that this technique could be used to analyze brain tissue from other organisms as well; they used it to image the entire brain of the fruit fly, which is the size of a poppy seed and contains about 100,000 neurons.
In future, this technique could be used to trace circuits that control memory formation and recall, to study how sensory input leads to a specific behavior, or to analyze how emotions are coupled to decision-making.
