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European project to map brain

One of Europe’s leading neurosciences’ research institutions is teaming up with IBM to create a detailed 3D model of the brain. Researchers hope that more detailed knowledge of the brain’s micro-circuitry will help in understanding and treating a number of psychiatric conditions such as autism, schizophrenia and depression. The joint venture may also lead to new treatments for variant CJD, the human form of ‘mad cow’ disease.

Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is joining with IBM’s Zurich Research Labs to create a detailed map of the circuitry in the neocortex: the largest and most complicated part of the human brain. Over time, researchers will expand the mapping project to cover the detailed micro-circuitry of other parts of the brain. Ultimately, they hope to achieve an accurate, computer-based model of the circuitry of the entire brain.

Using a digital model, scientists at EPFL will run computer-based simulations of the brain at the molecular level that aim to shed light on internal processes such as thought, perception and memory. Researchers also hope to carry out detailed studies of particular areas of neural networking that are thought to be linked with certain psychiatric disorders.

“Modelling the brain at the cellular level is a massive undertaking because of the hundreds of thousands of parameters that need to be taken into account”, said Professor Henry Makram of EPFL, who is leading the project. “We are embarking on one of the most ambitious research initiatives ever undertaken in the field of neuroscience.”

Professor Makram is the founder of the Brain and Mind Institute at EPFL. In more than 10 years of laboratory research, the Institute has assembled what it claims is the world’s largest set of empirical data on the micro architecture of the neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for all higher mental functions.

The first phase of the project will be to make a software replica of a column of the neocortex. The neocortex constitutes about 85% of the human brain’s total mass and is thought to be responsible for the cognitive functions of language, learning, memory and complex thought. Recent research has shown that humans have proportionally no greater volume of neocortex than other primates, or many higher mammals. Nor do humans have any greater density of neurons: in fact, human brains appear to be less dense than many smaller mammals. What human brains do appear to possess is greater complexity in brain structure and far greater density of neural connections. The EPFL researchers hope to create an exact map of these connections, and a model of how they interact.
An accurate replica of the neocortical column will be the first step to simulating the whole brain. It will also provide researchers with the link between genetic, molecular and cognitive levels of brain function. The second and subsequent phases will expand the simulation to include circuitry from other brain regions and eventually the whole brain.

Researchers from IBM’s Zurich labs will utilise EPFL’s existing empirical dataset to create a working 3D model that simulates the electro-chemical interactions of the brain’s interior.

At the centre of the research efforts will be an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. Developed by IBM together with the National Nuclear Security Agency, the US defence body that designs and tests America’s nuclear bombs, Blue Gene installations include the San Diego Supercomputing Centre, the Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Edinburgh. The world’s most powerful computer is the Blue Gene installation at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the home of ‘Star wars’. The system that will be installed at EPFL will occupy the floor space of about four refrigerators, and will have a peak processing speed of at least 22.8 trillion floating-point operations per second (22.8 teraflops).
When not number crunching for Professor Makram’s team, physicists from EPFL and IBM will use the computer to research post-CMOS technologies like carbon nanotubes. Other EPFL teams will use it to study the problem of controlling high-energy plasmas: the key to harnessing thermonuclear power; and yet others will study protein folding and its role in the development of vCJD.