This isn't the first foray into growing 3D stem-cell structures that mimic brain development, but what sets the new organoids apart is that they map onto key brain regions in humans, enabling researchers to understand how the human brain develops - and what happens when it goes awry. The model opens a window onto the development of the human forebrain, which plays a key role in the processing of information related to complex cognitive activities, sensory processing, and motor function. In a landmark new study, researchers have recreated the human forebrain using 3D brain organoids - tiny cellular models of the brain - that they say successfully model late stages of brain development for the first time.

Much of what makes us uniquely human - our emotions, memories, consciousness - stems from this 3-pound organ, yet the bulk of what we know about the brain comes from studying animals. Following a few passes by various automated systems, human eyes provided a visual edit pass for some cells to determine whether or not the algorithms were identifying them correctly.Some say that out of all the objects in the universe, the human brain is the most complex. Machine learning algorithms carefully scanned the slice to identify the different cells and their underlying structures. This all resulted in the creation of 225 million two-dimensional images that could be stitched together to manifest a single 3D volume. A scanning electron microscope was employed next to image the sample, with a maximum resolution registering down to 4 nm. The surgical sample was then diced into roughly 5,300 slices each around 30 nanometers (nm) thick.

This slice was stained for added visual clarity, then coated in resin to protect and preserve it. Now in a huge advancement, Google and the Lichtman Lab at Harvard University has presented a mind-boggling model of a micro section of the human brain, which began with a microscopic sample obtained from the temporal lobe of a human cerebral cortex. This detailed database and its visualization tools has totally altered the way that neural circuits and pathways are understood in the fly brain. Back in January 2020, Google released the fly “hemibrain” connectome, an online database delivering the morphological structure and synaptic connectivity of approximately half of a fruit fly brain.

Human brain 3d model