Observing anything and everything within the human brain, no matter how large or small while it is fully intact, has been an out-of-reach dream of neuroscience for decades, but in a new study in Science, an MIT-based team describes a technology pipeline that enabled them to finely process, richly label and sharply image full hemispheres of the brains of two donors—one with Alzheimer’s and one without—at high resolution and speed.
“We performed holistic imaging of human brain tissues at multiple resolutions from single synapses to whole brain hemispheres and we have made that data available,” said senior and corresponding author Kwanghun Chung, associate professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT. “This technology pipeline really enables us to analyze the human brain at multiple scales. Potentially this pipeline can be used for fully mapping human brains.”
