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Concept
Blue Brain Project
Summary
The Blue Brain Project is a Swiss brain research initiative that aims to create a digital reconstruction of the mouse brain. The project was founded in May 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Its mission is to use biologically-detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the mammalian brain to identify the fundamental principles of brain structure and function.
The project is headed by the founding director Henry Markram—who also launched the European Human Brain Project—and is co-directed by Felix Schürmann, Adriana Salvatore and Sean Hill. Using a Blue Gene supercomputer running Michael Hines's NEURON, the simulation involves a biologically realistic model of neurons and an empirically reconstructed model connectome.
There are a number of collaborations, including the Cajal Blue Brain, which is coordinated by the Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid (CeSViMa), and others run by universities and independent laboratories.
The initial goal of the project, which was completed in December 2006, was the creation of a simulated rat neocortical column, which is considered by some researchers to be the smallest functional unit of the neocortex, which is thought to be responsible for higher functions such as conscious thought. In humans, each column is about in length, has a diameter of and contains about 60,000 neurons. Rat neocortical columns are very similar in structure but contain only 10,000 neurons and 108 synapses. Between 1995 and 2005, Markram mapped the types of neurons and their connections in such a column.
By 2005, the first cellular model was completed. The first artificial cellular neocortical column of 10,000 cells was built by 2008. By July 2011, a cellular mesocircuit of 100 neocortical columns with a million cells in total was built. A cellular rat brain had been planned for 2014 with 100 mesocircuits totalling a hundred million cells. A cellular human brain equivalent to 1,000 rat brains with a total of a hundred billion cells has been predicted to be possible by 2023.
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