Map of brain examines its hills and valleys

A digital, 3D model of the brain helps scientists study the complexities of the brain.

NEW YORK // Scientists have a developed an atlas of the brain to help them study man's most complex organ.

The digital, three-dimensional model, called "BigBrain", has a resolution finer than a human hair, so it can reveal clusters of brain cells and even some large individual cells. It is being made available to scientists around the world.

To make the atlas, researchers sliced a cadaver brain from a 65-year-old woman into 7,400 thin sections, stained them to reveal tiny features, and photographed each one. Then they used computers to combine the data into a 3-D digital model.

The idea of thin-slicing a brain to study its anatomy is not new. In fact, complete bodies of a man and a woman were sliced and photographed about 20 years ago to create an anatomy reference called the Visible Human Project.

The researchers chose the woman's brain for no reason other than that it was healthy, said Katrin Amunts of Heinrich Heine University of Duesseldorf in Germany.

She is lead author of a report on the atlas, published on Thursday in the journal Science. Scientists have begun mapping data from other brain studies onto the new model to gain new insights, said the senior author, Karl Zilles of the Julich Aachen Research Alliance in Julich, Germany.

Malcolm Ritter