Israeli scientists shed new light on how the brain functions
The research could have a meaningful impact in the field of personalized medicine.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFStudy on the brain's individual functional connectivity patterns by Technion.(photo credit: TECHNION SPOKESPERSON'S OFFICE)
How does the brain work? What is the connection between its structure and its functioning? A team of Israeli scientists from the Technion Institute of Technology, in cooperation with colleagues from the US and France, has managed to demonstrate the significance of personalized brain models, which could have a meaningful impact in the field of personalized medicine.In an academic article published Thursday in PNAS, the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the group demonstrated that the individual map of structural neural connections, which are the physical links between regions, predicts the individual functional connectivity patterns, namely, how neural activity is spreading in the brain.As explained in a statement, the researchers took advantage of mice studies to "systematically investigate the informative content of different structural features in explaining the emergence of the functional ones."They employed structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan mice's brains, then built a virtual model of their brain and tried to simulate their functional organization based on the structural connectivity, finally comparing it to the results of functional MRI on the same mice.With this study, the scientists were able to demonstrate that “individual variations define a specific structural fingerprint with a direct impact upon the functional organization ofindividual brains”. This finding will potentially support future clinical trials focusing on personalized treatments in brain disorders such as epilepsy, depression and Alzheimer’s disease, in which the virtual brain may predict treatment outcome in individual patients.The study was conducted by Professor Itamar Kahn, director of the Brain Systems Organization in Health and Disease Lab at Technion. Graduate students Eyal Bergmann and Francesca Melozzi were lead co-authors. Kahn's work focuses on investigating brain function and behavior in health and disease. As explained in the American Technion Society's website, his research has applications for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and neurodevelopmental disorders including autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
