neurodudes

Henry Markram, the director of the IBM-sponsored Blue Brain Project has written an article in the latest issue of Nature Reviews: Neuroscience that provides the most technical details about the project to date.

From the article:

“The three-dimensional neurons are then imported into BlueBuilder, a circuit builder that loads neurons into their layers according to a ‘recipe’ of neuron numbers and proportions. A collision detection algorithm is run to determine the structural positioning of all axo-dendritic touches, and neurons are jittered and spun until the structural touches match experimentally derived statistics. [...] Probabilities of connectivity between different types of neuron are used to determine which neurons are connected, and all axo-dendritic touches are converted into synaptic connections. The manner in which the axons map onto the dendrites between specific anatomical classes and the distribution of synapses received by a class of neurons are used to verify and fine-tune the biological accuracy of the synaptic mapping between neurons. It is therefore possible to place 10–50 million synapses in accurate three-dimensional space, distributed on the detailed three-dimensional morphology of each neuron.”

–Stephen

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 at 2:44 am by A Neurodudes Reader and is filed under At the scale of systems and functions, Computation within single neurons, Computational neuroscience, Neural network models. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.