IIT Madras Brain Centre Builds Digital Map of the Human Brain
IIT Madras's Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre is digitising donated human brains at high resolution, generating nearly 1.5 petabytes of data per brain.
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras is working to map the human brain by combining neuroscience, engineering and advanced imaging, with its Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre (SGBC) aiming to chart the organ cell by cell and make the results openly available.
Set up in 2022, the centre has expanded from a team of five to more than 200 doctors, scientists, technicians and engineers. It is headed by Prof Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam of the Department of Electrical Engineering, with Dr Richa Verma serving as scientific director.
From tissue to digital data
The centre has developed indigenous technology for high-resolution brain imaging and digitisation. The process involves freezing a human brain, slicing it into very thin sections, staining the slices and scanning them using large-scale equipment built with an Indian company. Each digitised brain can yield close to 1.5 petabytes of data.
According to the institute, the centre has received more than 400 donated brains and is building an open resource intended to deepen understanding of the human brain and neurological disorders.
Disease and the brain
Dr Verma said the mission is to understand how the human brain is organised. Much of the existing knowledge, she noted, comes from studies of monkey brains, and while these have been useful, many treatments that work in such disease models have not translated to humans. The centre also seeks to study how the brain changes when diseases such as strokes occur.
IIT Madras Director V Kamakoti said the centre examines brains affected by conditions including rabies, dementia and Alzheimer's to understand how these diseases alter the brain's structure.
Global partnerships
Prof Sivaprakasam observed that the field is too complex for any single country to address alone. The centre has partnered with universities in the United States, including the University of South Carolina, Johns Hopkins, a university in Washington, DC, and the University of California, San Francisco.
He said the centre currently has 30 collaborators worldwide, spread across seven or eight countries on different continents. Most are visiting professors who stay for two or three months, and the next stage will involve students coming for longer periods.