Connectomics

As a writer and blogger about Alzheimer’s Disease, Dementia and Cognition, I am always on the lookout for where the latest medical research is headed in the quest for an answer to stopping AD or even an eventual cure.

Over the recent holidays, I came across an unfamiliar term at one of the science news web sites. The word or term is connectomics. Connect what?  Connectomics.

A hybridized word first introduced by Professor Olaf Sporns in 2005. He coined the word to  describe what he envisioned as the frontier science of micro cellular nerve circuit mapping.  Thereafter, micro cellular nerve circuit mapping or connectomics, began to gain traction as a new field of neural science in 2007.

At the forefront of this field is Dr. Jeff Lichtman of Harvard University. Dr. Lichtman has received the backing of the National Institute of Health for his work along with $40 million in NIH grants to fund his Human Connectome Project.  The HCP is analogous to the Human Genome Project which successfully took on the challenge of mapping the human genome.

The Human Connectome Project calls for the complete mapping of all of the neural cell circuitry paths within the human brain.  

The computing storage capacity projected to be required for the completion of this project will be formidable.  Present projected estimates forecast a data storage demand of something on the order of 1 million petabytes.  To give one an idea of what kind of number this is, consider the following.

A single petabyte is 10 to the 15th power or 1 quadrillion bytes of data. Now multiply 1 quadrillion times 1 million!

By way of comparison, Facebook can  store up to 40 billion photos with just 1 petabyte of storage at one of its US server arrays.

The human brain is estimated to contain approximately 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) with an aggregate total of 100 trillion synapses.  Each neuron can have as many as 10,000 connections to other individual neuron cells.  This is a mind boggling network of intricate and microscopically small circuitry.

A comparable challenge will be developing sufficiently powerful enough software that will allow for the automated generation of three-dimensional nanoscale images of brain tissue.

Hurdles still remain in developing super fast and reliable mathematical algorithms and robotic imaging machinery that can reliably see and interpret a wide range of neuron cell shapes.

Nevertheless, Dr. Lichtman is moving forward with this project and there is a lot of excitement being generated in the field of neuroscience over what discoveries might occur during the course of the work.

Medical science hopes that this project will allow them to better understand human memory, intelligence, mental disorders and neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Definitely a long term project with the payoff 10 to 12 years down the road but still one that sounds promising and exciting.


Jeff Dodson
January 6th 2011