New Brain Centre at IIT Madras Aims to Become Global Neuro Research Hub

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras is establishing a brain research centre on campus that will use an engineering and technology-based approach to create the highest resolution map of the human brain, as well as contribute to future brain-related research projects at the institute.

Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam, who now leads IIT Madras' Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre, will also run this centre, which is formally dubbed 'Computational & Experimental Platform for High-Resolution Terapixel Imaging of Ex-vivo Human Brain Cells.'

The new brain research centre's primary purpose, according to Sivaprakasam, is to produce a first-layer data collection of high-resolution imaging of the human brain, which will be powered by technology.

"Our goal is to develop an atlas of human brain cells and their connectivity. It is the most complex human organ, with tens of billions of cells intricately interwoven. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can now be used to image the human brain. However, MRI-based brain reconstruction is done at the millimetre level, which implies the data produced is coarse "Sivaprakasam explained.

"While the aforementioned data is adequate for some therapies, we require imaging data at 0.5 micron or even smaller to delve deeper into the subject." That is now not achievable in a living human brain, let alone a posthumous one, in distinct areas of the brain. This is what we started in 2019 "he continued.

The proposal was subsequently submitted to K. Vijay Raghavan, the government of India's senior scientific advisor, who approved the establishment of the brain research centre at IIT Madras in February 2020.

Technology-driven platforms are increasingly being used in brain research projects. BrainSightAI, an early-stage Indian startup, is using functional MRI (fMRI) data to create virtual or digital maps of the human brain using Dassault Systemes' augmented technology platform – and then using the replicated digital twin to understand the impact of electrical impulses in treating neurological conditions like schizophrenia.

Such technologies are also being used in neurological research by India's National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (Nimhans). Sivaprakasam believes that the IIT Madras facility is worldwide unique in terms of study objective and approach- since it does not take a biological approach to brain research, but rather one driven by new-age technologies.

Over 2,000 sections of a tiny human brain will be created at the facility and mapped into data in multiples of 100TB. The data is subsequently processed by a high-performance computing platform to produce brain atlas for neurological research.

"Three brains have already been processed via our centre." It is now used by faculties all around the world, including about 15 scholars from Europe, the United States, South Africa, and Japan,” Sivaprakasam said. Students will be involved in the centre over the next decade and beyond, as will corporations in the medical and pharmaceutical industries for future research initiatives on neurological diseases.