LUMC will help build most detailed atlas of human brain to date

A leading team of international brain researchers aims to map the approximately 200 billion cells in the human brain according to their type and function. A project involving approximately $110 million. LUMC is developing data visualization techniques to make the complex data that emerges from it more comprehensible. This atlas is expected to accelerate research into the causes and treatments of brain diseases.

A gigantic project, is how Biomedical Imaging Professor and Medical Delta Professor Boudewijn Lelieveldt calls the BRAIN Initiative® Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) program. "The National Institutes of Health in the United States have provided $500 million to gain a better understanding of the different types of cells in our brain," says Lelieveldt. BICAN is also considered the brain version of the Human Genome Project, an extraordinary scientific effort that aimed to map the entire human genome. LUMC is involved in a recently awarded $110 million subproject that aims to map cell types and their function in the brain using state-of-the-art so-called spatial omics techniques.

Comic book

Lelieveldt and colleagues are computer scientists and, by their own admission, involved in a small part of this project. But that doesn't make their role unimportant. "You can imagine that this project generates a huge amount of data, it will be our job to make this data more insightful," says Lelieveldt. "We try to distill a clear compact message from all the data, as if you have to reduce the thickest book in the world to a thin picture book with the essence." To do this, they use the Cytosplore Viewer software they developed themselves within the Medical Delta, and in close cooperation with Dr. Thomas Höllt of TU Delft. LUMC and TU Delft have been working together in this area of research for some time, including within the Medical Delta AI for Computational Life Sciences scientific program of which Lelieveldt is one of Scientific Leaders.

Although the entire project is led by the Allen Institute for Brain Science in the United States, the BICAN program is a true team effort. Researcher groups from many leading American universities, such as Harvard, as well as European and Asian universities are involved. It is expected that in five years the most detailed atlas of the human brain will be ready.

Pinch

And then? "Then a lot of puzzle pieces will fall together," says Lelieveldt. "It will give researchers around the world more insight into exactly how our brain works and what underlies various brain diseases like Alzheimer's. It will accelerate the development of treatments." Lelieveldt considers it an honor to be part of this project. "I really have to pinch myself sometimes. These are extremely expensive and complex experiments that are not financially feasible for individual universities, so the possibilities and scale of the project seem almost endless. And it is, for us computer scientists, a truly monumental dataset to work on."

Read more about the project on the Allen Institute website.