Functional connectomics of neural networks

April 27, 2011
Clay Reid | Harvard Medical School

Local circuits in the cerebral cortex consist of tens of thousands of neurons, each of which makes and receives thousands of connections. The biggest impediment to understanding these circuits is that we have no wiring diagrams of these interconnections. But even if we had a wiring diagram, understanding the network would also require information about each neuron’s function. Recently, we have demonstrated that the relationship between structure and function can be studied in the cortex with a combination of optical techniques to study neural function, followed by very large-scale anatomical imaging with electron microscopy (Bock et al., 2011).

I will discuss methods for collecting large-scale data from neural circuits and the computational challenges presented. In particular, the new field of connectomics requires tools for the segmention and visualization multi-terabyte 3D data sets. For the first time, these data contain the information required to reconstruct large-scale networks in the mammalian brain.

Bock, DD, Lee, W-CA, et al. (2011) Network anatomy and in vivo physiology of a group of visual cortical neurons. Nature, 471:177-182. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v471/n7337/full/nature09802.html

Speaker Details

R. Clay Reid, MD, PhD, is Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. His research on visual perception has been based on new technologies for studying increasingly large groups of cells in the living brain. Past research in his lab has examined on brain activity: using electrical and optical methods for studying the firing patterns of individual brain cells. His current work uses tera-scale anatomical data to trace the connections in neural networks: a new field known as connectomics.