High-res 'BigBrain' Project Provides Google Earth-like Details of Brain

The highest resolution three-dimensional digital model of the brain ever made has been produced by an international team of researchers.

Dubbed the "BigBrain," the model will provide brain details up to 50 times greater than previous brain mapping efforts, providing scientists with their closest-ever look at the underlying structures of the brain.

BigBrain serves as an unprecedentedly detailed anatomical model, enabling researchers to use it as a highly accurate reference, whether they are investigating large patterns of brain function or small details.

BigBrain can digitally reproduce the brain's features down to a scale smaller than the width of a human hair.

"For instance, when you are interested in a common neurodegenerative disorder, like Alzheimer's disease, you have the first ever brain model where you can look into details of the ... brain region important for memory," Karl Zilles, a BigBrain team member based at Düsseldorf University, told the Guardian.

Katrin Amunts from the Julich Research Centre in Germany, who was involved in the project, told the BBC that the BigBrain model was "like using Google Earth. You can see details that are not visible before we had this 3D reconstruction".

The work, which used a special tool to cut sections of a preserved brain into tiny slivers only 20 micrometers thick, was called a "technological tour de force" by team member Alan Evans of McGill of University in Canada.

To make the BigBrain model, the research team took the brain of a 65-year-old deceased woman and sliced it into 7,400 sections, each half the thickness of a human hair. The process took 10 years to complete, meticulously capturing the locations of some 80 billion neurons.

The latest research was published in the journal Science and the full data set of the BigBrain project will be made freely available to researchers.

The completion of the project comes shortly after a series of worldwide announcements to further explore the human brain. In April, U.S. President Barack Obama launched a $100 million project to map the brain in action. In January, the European Commission awarded more than 500 million Euros to the Human Brain Project.