Brain mapping techniques are constantly evolving, and rely on the development and refinement of image acquisition, representation, analysis, visualization and interpretation techniques. Functional and structural neuroimaging are at the core of the mapping aspect of brain mapping.
In the late 1980s in the United States, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science was commissioned to establish a panel to investigate the value of integrating neuroscientific information across a variety of techniques.
Following a series of meetings, the International Consortium for Brain Mapping (ICBM) evolved. The ultimate goal is to develop flexible computational brain atlases.
In October 2021, the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network concluded the first phase of a long-term project to generate an atlas of the entire mouse (mammalian) brain with 17 studies, including an atlas and census of cell types in the primary motor cortex.
In 2024, FlyWire, a team of 287 researchers spanning 76 institutions completed a brain mapping, or connectome, of an adult animal (a Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly) and published their results in Nature. Prior to this, the only adult animal to have its brain entirely reconstructed was the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, but the fruit fly brain map is the first "complete map of any complex brain", according to Murthy, one of the researchers involved. Primary mapping data was collected through electron microscopy, assisted by artificial intelligence and citizen scientists, who corrected errors that artificial intelligence made. The resulting model had more than 140,000 neurons with over 50 million synapses. From the model, research expect to identify how the brain creates new connections for functions such as vision, creating digital twin equivalents to track how segments of the neuron connection map interact to external signals, including the nervous system.
In 2021, the first connectome that shows how an animal's brain changes throughout its lifetime was reported. Scientists mapped and compared the whole brains of eight isogenic C. elegans worms, each at a different stage of development. Later that year, scientists combined electron microscopy and brainbow imaging to show for the first time the development of a mammalian neural circuit. They reported the complete wiring diagrams between the CNS and muscles of ten individual mice.
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