AI-powered brain map could help demystify Alzheimer’s and autism | Neuroscience

Neuroscientists at a Florida university have developed a technologically advanced method of brain mapping that they say can help demystify Alzheimer’s disease, autism and related disorders, and offer hope for more treatments. effective against head trauma.

A team from the University of South Florida (USF) Hearing Development and Connectomics Lab is using virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence to create a high-definition visual timeline of the journey of billions of neurons in the brain in development of newborn mice.

Complex imaging technology provides complex 3D renderings of the timeline of early brain formation, which are run through existing large language AI models and analyzed for changes. Rodents have similar neuron types and connections to humans.

Science focuses on Held’s calyx, the largest nerve ending in the brain of all mammals, which processes sound. Auditory dysfunction is widely recognized as the source of symptoms of disorders, including autism, that commonly result in social and cognitive impairments.

“This information can help us understand the serious developmental disorders that occur when the brain does not develop properly from the beginning,” said Dr. George Spirou, a professor of medical engineering at USF, who compared the imagery to a road map.

“It’s like if you had a route from, say, New York to Chicago, and someone took a detour through Cleveland. You can figure out why there was an off-ramp that shouldn’t have been there, and go back and fix it.

“Perhaps we will find the keys to certain developmental disorders. And in a situation of traumatic physical injury or neuronal degeneration, is there a way to recapitulate development?

“If we could trick a part of the brain into thinking that it’s growing and needs to develop more synapses, that could be therapeutic. Without completely succeeding in this area, it’s a guess, but it certainly seems 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 analyze the synapses where they connect and communicate. The development of neural systems in mammals has been widely studied, but never at this combined level of temporal and spatial resolution, he said.

“Between the fourth and fifth months of gestation, the number of neurons in the nervous system explodes almost exponentially and synapses form at a rate of approximately one million per second, an incredible number considering that There are nearly 100 trillion synapses in an adult human brain,” he said.

“The VR platform imports huge amounts of data, and is able to view and understand it in 3D. There’s simply no way to do this on a 2D screen.

Spirou said that in addition to possessing structural similarities to the human brain, newborn mice are used for research because they provide a sort of microcosm of human gestation.

“At two days old the nerve ending begins to develop, at four days it grows, and at six days it is almost fully developed,” he said.

“What the brain does is like a game of musical chairs. The neurons over-innervate, and then pruning takes place, like removing a chair and someone is out of the game. By six days of age, most of this pruning takes place, and by age of nine days, everything is defined as it will be the case in an adult.

“Mice are born very immature, so the first week or so in a mouse is equivalent to the time in utero in a human.”

The USF project, carried out in collaboration with scientists from the University of California at San Diego, Oregon Health and Science University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was funded in part by a $3.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). ).

In 2013, then-President Barack Obama announced an ambitious project to map the human brain called the Brain Initiative, promising an initial $100 million in federal funding. dollars to be distributed through the NIH and the National Science Foundation.

More than a decade of advances in neurological research followed, which were reflected outside the de facto federal framework. Privately funded experiments have gained prominence in recent years and months, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, in which a paralyzed patient was able to control a computer using a chip implanted in his brain, before setbacks do not appear.

“Other companies are doing the same thing, or even better, and studying human brain tissue from neurosurgical interventions is a new generation (of research), but on adults,” Spirou said.

“The time frame that we’re looking at, which would actually be maybe four-fifths within six months of gestation, we’re not there yet. This poses a whole host of problems and you wouldn’t want to take a healthy situation and run an experiment that could change the trajectory of development.

“So what we’re doing with these mouse models will be the best approach for some time to come. What’s happening in science is that what we don’t know is becoming clearer and clearer, and it’s a growing field.