IIT-Madras sets up centre to map human brain at cellular level

The Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre will focus on high resolution imaging of whole human brain. (Representative image)

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras recently launched the Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre which aims to map the human brain at the cellular and connectivity levels.

The centre will focus on high resolution imaging of whole human brain.

K VijayRaghavan, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Centre, who inaugurated the centre, said that globally, there are many projects that are studying the brain in different approaches. "Millions of dollars are spent in studying the brain in different ways. But this centre at IIT Madras is the only one of this kind. People across the world will try to replicate this project and use the data of the centre," he said.

The PSA’s office has supported the centre through initial funding, VijayRaghavan added.

In the Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre, IIT Madras plans to train hundreds of undergraduate and postgraduate students in neuroscience and computing, machine learning techniques on brain data, the institute stated in a release.
The first ongoing project of the Centre is titled ‘Computational and Experimental Platform for High-Resolution Terapixel Imaging of ex-vivo Human Brains’ for high-throughput light microscopic imaging of whole human brains.  Through this project, the Centre has developed a high-throughput histology pipeline that processes whole human brains into high-resolution digital images.

“Using this technology platform, the Centre is imaging post-mortem human brains of different types and ages. The Centre has already acquired whole brain serial-section cell-resolution volumes of three developing brains to date," the release stated. "These unique first-in-class data sets that provide a high-resolution view of developing brains will be released in the near future."