Brain dump: How publicly available fMRI can help inform neuronal network architecture

Abstract

Summary form only given. Connectomics is an emergent discipline of Neuroinformatics that studies how the brain is connected, both anatomically and functionally. A number of projects throughout the neuroscience community have tackled the problem of determining interconnectivity from the nano scale - such as those enabled by laser-scanning light microscopy and semi-automated electron microscopy - to the micro scale of neurons and neuron clusters, to the macro scale of fMRI. The amount of data required to map out the macro scale is in the manageable multi-terabyte range, and largely exists today, while gathering one milometer cubed of synaptic-level data already approaches the multi-petabyte scale and is a few years away. Between these two extremes most likely lies the fastest and most representative path to a useful map of human neuronal connectivity. Although extremely informative on may topics concerning neuronal connectivity, the of the main limitations of the smaller scale approaches are 1) the considerable amount of time and energy needed to have one sample which will likely not be widely representative of a typical human brain and 2) their highly invasive or destructive nature renders them poorly adaptable to living humans.