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Researchers use an AI brain map to decode Alzheimer’s and autism
| Researchers use an AI brain map to decode Alzheimer’s and autism |
 Source: WTSP/Screenshot |
| We have about as many neurons as the Milky Way has stars — roughly 100 billion. And understanding how the brain works can be like peering into the night sky without a telescope. Now, researchers at the University of South Florida are using AI to get a close-up view. |
| It’s believed that disorders like autism and Alzheimer’s might be closely related to how the brain processes sound. So, the researchers decided to zoom into the auditory centers of the brain to investigate how they develop over time. They’re using mice as their test subjects for now, but the experiments could still offer important insights, since mouse brains are structurally similar to ours. |
| The scientists are focusing on the brain’s largest synapse, called the calyx of Held, and tracking how nerve cells communicate with each other there. They can feed their data through an AI model to build a digital representation of that information, then explore a 3-D map of the data in virtual reality. |
| If we can understand how the brain grows and changes over time, we might be able to find new treatments for different neurological disorders and even repair traumatic brain injuries. “It’s like you have a route from, say, New York to Chicago, and someone detours in Cleveland,” medical engineering professor George Spirou told the Guardian. “You can figure out why there was some off-ramp that shouldn’t have been there, and go back and fix it.” |