Brain mapping

Brain mapping is a area of research and clinical application in inneuroscience, which studies and develops advanced techniques for imaging, representation, analysis, visualization and interpretation of brain imaging and meta data.

History
In the late 1980s in the United States, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science was commissioned to establish a panel to investigate the value of integrating neuroscientific information across a variety of techniques. Of specific interest is using structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), EEG, positron emission tomography (PET) and other non-invasive scanning techniques to map anatomy, physiology, perfusion, function and phenotypes of the human brain. Both healthy and diseased brains may be mapped to study memory, learning, aging, and drug effects in various populations such as schitzophrenics, autistics, and clinically depressed people. This led to the establishment of the Human Brain Project. Following a series of meetings, the International Consortium for Brain Mapping (ICBM) evolved. The ultimate goal is to develop flexible computational brain atlases.

Current Atlas Tools
Talairach Atlas, 1988

Harvard Whole Brain Atlas, 1995

MNI Template, 1998 (the standard template of SPM and International Consortium for Brain Mapping)

National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBC)

 * Center for Computational Biology
 * National Center for Multi-Scale Study of Cellular Networks
 * National Center for Biomedical Ontology
 * Physics-based Simulation of Biological Structures
 * National Alliance for Medical Imaging Computing
 * Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside
 * National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics