IIT Madras launches Centre to power to map Human Brains at Cellular Level

This new state-of-the-art centre aims to become a leading global centre for Human Brain Research with Transformative Impact in the fields of Science and Medicine

Indian Institute of Technology Madras has launched the Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre to power an ambitious Global Project to map the human brain at the cellular and connectivity levels, with a focus on high-resolution brain imaging.

This state-of-the-art Centre aims to become a world-renowned research centre, generating unprecedented human brain data, scientific output and technology tools.

IIT Madras plans to train hundreds of undergraduate and postgraduate students at this Centre in neuroscience and computing, machine learning techniques on cutting-edge brain data.

The Centre is supported by Kris Gopalakrishnan and Sudha Gopalakrishnan. As per IIT Madras, their dedicated efforts in seeding research at IIT Madras at the intersection of Neuroscience and Engineering are now powering this Centre in the frontier research area of brain mapping.

Addressing the inaugural event, Prof. K. VijayRaghavan, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, said, “The combination of IIT Madras, which has the expertise in science and data analysis, with medicine is going to be revolutionary. Going forward, we have an extraordinary problem in Neuroscience, i.e. on the functioning of human brain. We are at an earlier stage in our understanding of the human brain functioning. The IIT Madras brain centre will help in solving complex issues that will benefit the world.”

The first ongoing project of the Centre titled ‘Computational and Experimental Platform for High-Resolution Terapixel Imaging of ex-vivo Human Brains’ for high-throughput light microscopic imaging of whole human brains is supported by the Office of Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India. Through this project, the Centre has developed a high-throughput histology pipeline that processes whole human brains into high-resolution digital images.

Centre imaging post-mortem human brains

Using this technology platform, the Centre is imaging post-mortem human brains of different types and ages. The Centre has already acquired whole brain serial-section cell-resolution volumes of three developing brains to date. These unique first-in-class data sets that provide a high-resolution view of developing brains will be released in the near future.

Congratulating the Researchers, Prof. V. Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, said, “The Brain Research Centre is a great case study which proves that technology can contribute to medicine and solve societal problems. The Centre will make deep in-roads in collecting data for brain research.”

Further, Prof. Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam, Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras, and Head of Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre said, “The technology platform we have developed and our strong medical collaborations, is allowing us to generate high-resolution large-format histology sections of human brains that will advance the field significantly.”