Courtesy of Randy Buckner and Bruce Rosen of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Visualization group, Laboratory of Neuro Imaging

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND -Researchers in the US are seeing for the first time “and in stunning detail—how neural fibers crisscross the brain and connect its regions”, according Protomag, published Friday 13 January.

The new images show the connecting tissue, or white matter, of the brain and offer hope for tracking the fibers’ multiple pathways, which could in turn provide strong clues about the sources of mental illness and brain disorders.

Two major projects at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Superstruct Project and the Human Connectome Project with the University of California, Los Angeles, are collecting these images from thousands of people.

“Their goal is to understand what makes the human brain different from the brains of other animals and why some people are at risk for mental illness.

Courtesy of Randy Buckner and Bruce Rosen of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Visualization group, Laboratory of Neuro Imaging

“Neuroscientists believe that diseases such as schizophrenia, bipolar disease and autism may be caused by subtle disruptions to the brain’s wiring. In compiling and comparing brain images of so many healthy and mentally ill people, scientists hope to see how connections go awry in disease so that they can develop early interventions and therapy targets.”

The imaging technique “greatly increases the power of conventional scanners and uses mega-magnets to map the way water molecules move in the brain’s gray matter, delineating in real time which neurons are activated and in which direction they are sending impulses.”

The images show less than 1% of the white matter, notes Protomag: “capturing too much of the dense neural pathways would obscure the brain’s underlying structure.”

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