From TORGNY GREITZ
Our chances of exploring the complicated and so far rigorously concealed
‘machinery of the mind’ and understanding how it works have increased enormously
due to recent advances in nuclear medicine and brain imaging techniques.
Therefore, one must welcome the initiative taken by American scientists
to launch a joint project to create a large scale computerised database
that ‘should do for the brain what the human genome project will do for
our DNA’ (‘Neuroscientists plan ‘atlas’ of the brain’, 9 February).
The prospect of having an atlas of brain maps displaying the whereabouts
in the brain of various ‘activity centres’ has been discussed by neuroscientists
for some time. From the article, however, one gets the impression that the
idea has emerged quite recently, and that the tools needed to construct
such an atlas are perhaps only available in North America.
In fact, a project with the same objective was started in Sweden more
than 10 years ago as a joint venture between the Karolinska Institute and
Stockholm University. Since then our computerised atlas has been under continuous
development; today, its database contains more than 350 brain structures,
as compared to the 120 structures of the Montreal atlas.
It is also stated that the ‘Canadian scientists have already made some
progress by overlaying 16 horizontal brain sections, produced by magnetic
resonance imaging, with a cerebral map’. Facilities for such an operation,
including the optional display of any structure boundaries in any plane
through the image volume, have been available with the Stockholm atlas for
several years.
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Torgny Greitz Karolinska Institute Stockholm, Sweden
