Blue Brain Technology
Blue Brain is the name of the world’s first virtual brain. A Virtual machine is one that can function as, a very appropriate application of an Artificial Intelligence human brain. Reverse engineering is a foremost concept of implementing the human brain and recreate it at the cellular level inside a complete simulation. The four major motivations behind the Blue Brain Technology are
1.treatment of brain disfunctioning
2.scientific curiosity about consciousness and human mind
3.a bottom up approach towards building thinking machine
4.databases of all neuroscientific research results and related past stories.
How to build a virtual brain
There are three main steps to build the virtual brain are
1.data acquisition
2.simulation
3.visualization of results.
Data Acquistion
Data acquisition involves taking brain slices, placing them under a microscope, and measuring the shape and electrical activity of individual neurons. This is how the different types of neuron are studied and catalogued. The neurons are typed by morphology (i.e. their shape), electrophysiological behaviour, location within the cortex, and their population density. These observations are translated into mathematical algorithms which describe the form, function, and positioning of neurons. The algorithms are then used to generate biologically-realistic virtual neurons ready for simulation.
Simulation
A software package was used by BBP for simulation of neurons and it was called as NEURONS , was developed in 1990 and written in C,C++ and FORTAN.The software continues to be under active development and, as of July 2012, is currently at version 7.2. It is free and open source software, both the code and the binaries are freely available on the website.
Workflow
The simulation step involves synthesising virtual cells using the algorithms that were found to describe real neurons. The algorthims and parameters are adjusted for the age, species, and disease stage of the animal being simulated. Every single protein is simulated, and there are about a billion of these in one cell.
1.First a network skeleton is built from all the different kinds of synthesised neurons.
2.Then the cells are connected together according to the rules that have been found experimentally.
3.Finally the neurons are functionalised and the simulation brought to life. The patterns of emergent behaviour are viewed with visualisation software.
BBP-SDK:
The BBP-SDK (Blue Brain Project - Software Development Kit) is a set of software classes (APIs) that allows researchers to utilize and inspect models and simulations. The SDK is a C++ library wrapped in Java and Python.
Visualization of results:
RTNeuron
RTNeuron is the primary application used by the BBP for visualisation of neural simulations. The software was developed internally by the BBP team. It is written in C++ and OpenGL. RTNeuron is ad-hoc software written specifically for neural simulations. RTNeuron takes the output from Hodgkin-Huxley simulations in NEURON and renders them in 3D. This allows researchers to watch as activation potentials propogate through a neuron and between neurons. The animations can be stopped, started and zoomed, thus letting researchers interact with the model. The visualisations are multi-scale, that is they can render individual neurons or a whole cortical column.
Blue Brain Project
The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to reverse engineer the human brain and recreate it at the cellular level inside a computer simulation. The project was founded in May 2005 by Henry Markram at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. Goals of the project are to gain a complete understanding of the brain and to enable better and faster development of brain disease treatments.
As of August 2012 the largest simulations are of mesocircuits containing around 100 cortical columns . Such simulations involve approximately 1 million neurons and 1 billion synapses. This is about the same scale as that of a honey bee brain. It is hoped that a rat brain neocortical simulation (~21 million neurons) will be achieved by the end of 2014. A full human brain simulation (86 billion neurons) should be possible by 2023 provided sufficient funding is received.
Motivation
As said above , there are 4 major motivations of the Blue Brain Project …
Four broad motivations behind the Blue Brain Project are:
1.Brain disease treatments
2.Scientific curiosity about consciousness and the human mind
3.Integration of all neuroscientific research results worldwide
4.Progress towards building thinking machines (bottom up approach)
One in four people will suffer from one of around 560 brain diseases during their lifetime. Therefore it is important to have a good strategy for understanding these diseases and finding suitable treatments. The living brain is very difficult to study. A virtual model, however, makes direct observations possible. Experiments on models are also more efficient and limit the need for laboratory animals. The Blue Brain Project, by including molecular-level simulations, could be used to study the effect of new pharmaceutical compounds on virtual brains of any species, age, and stage of disease.
Another aim of the Blue Brain Project is to provide a centrally coordinated resource for the 200,000 active neuroscientists in the world. Previously each researcher has focused on their own specialist field without the results being shared and easily available to all. The BBP hopes to build a bigger, better platform for neuroscientists to experiment on. The project is becoming a brain simulation facility that is accessible to all.