BRAIN Initiative

The White House BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) is a collaborative, public-private research initiative announced by the Obama administration on April 2, 2013, with the goal of supporting the development and application of innovative technologies that can create a dynamic understanding of brain function. This activity is a Grand Challenge focused on revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain, and was developed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as part of a broader White House Neuroscience Initiative. Inspired by the Human Genome Project, BRAIN aims to help researchers uncover the mysteries of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, depression, and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Participants in BRAIN and affiliates of the project include DARPA and IARPA as well as numerous private companies, universities, and other organizations in the U

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Reconstructing the brain: from image stacks to neuron synthesis

Sean Lewis Hill, Julian Charles Shillcock

Large-scale brain initiatives such as the US BRAIN initiative and the European Human Brain Project aim to marshall a vast amount of data and tools for the purpose of furthering our understanding of brains. Fundamental to this goal is that neuronal morphologies must be seamlessly reconstructed and aggregated on scales up to the whole rodent brain. The experimental labor needed to manually produce this number of digital morphologies is prohibitively large. The BigNeuron initiative is assembling community-generated, open-source, automated reconstruction algorithms into an open platform, and is beginning to generate an increasing flow of high quality reconstructed neurons. We propose a novel extension of this workflow to use this data stream to generate an unlimited number of statistically equivalent, yet distinct, digital morphologies. This will bring automated processing of reconstructed cells into digital neurons to the wider neuroscience community, and enable a range of morphologically- accurate computational models.

2016

How do we know what we know? Discovering neuroscience data sets through minimal metadata

Sean Lewis Hill

With the emergence of brain research initiatives around the world, the need for standards to facilitate neuroscience data sharing is growing. A crucial first step will be to establish a minimal metadata standard that allows the discovery of and access to similar or related data sets. This will be a key element of an open neuroscience-data ecosystem in which data is valued, preserved and reused.

2016

Neuroscience thinks big (and collaboratively)

Henry Markram

Despite cash-strapped times for research, several ambitious collaborative neuroscience projects have attracted large amounts of funding and media attention. In Europe, the Human Brain Project aims to develop a large-scale computer simulation of the brain, whereas in the United States, the Brain Activity Map is working towards establishing a functional connectome of the entire brain, and the Allen Institute for Brain Science has embarked upon a 10-year project to understand the mouse visual cortex (the MindScope project). US President Barack Obama's announcement of the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative) in April 2013 highlights the political commitment to neuroscience and is expected to further foster interdisciplinary collaborations, accelerate the development of new technologies and thus fuel much needed medical advances. In this Viewpoint article, five prominent neuroscientists explain the aims of the projects and how they are addressing some of the questions (and criticisms) that have arisen.

Nature Publishing Group2013

Neuroscience

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physi

Human Brain Project

The Human Brain Project (HBP) is a large ten-year scientific research project, based on exascale supercomputers, that aims to build a collaborative ICT-based scientific research infrastructure to al

Connectome

A connectome (kəˈnɛktoʊm) is a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain, and may be thought of as its "wiring diagram". An organism's nervous system is made up o

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