Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Connectomics
Summary
Connectomics is the production and study of connectomes: comprehensive maps of connections within an organism's nervous system. More generally, it can be thought of as the study of neuronal wiring diagrams with a focus on how structural connectivity, individual synapses, cellular morphology, and cellular ultrastructure contribute to the make up of a network. The nervous system is a network made of billions of connections and these connections are responsible for our thoughts, emotions, actions, memories, function and dysfunction. Therefore, the study of connectomics aims to advance our understanding of mental health and cognition by understanding how cells in the nervous system are connected and communicate. Because these structures are extremely complex, methods within this field use a high-throughput application of functional and structural neural imaging, most commonly magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), electron microscopy, and histological techniques in order to increase the speed, efficiency, and resolution of these nervous system maps. To date, tens of large scale datasets have been collected spanning the nervous system including the various areas of cortex, cerebellum, the retina, the peripheral nervous system and neuromuscular junctions.
Generally speaking, there are two types of connectomes; macroscale and microscale. Macroscale connectomics refers to using functional and structural MRI data to map out large fiber tracts and functional gray matter areas within the brain in terms of blood flow (functional) and water diffusivity (structural). Microscale connectomics is the mapping of small organisms' complete connectome using microscopy and histology. That is, all connections that exist in their central nervous system.
Macroscale connectomes are commonly collected using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI or DW-MRI) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.