Wellcome Image Awards 2015

Flavio Dell'Acqua was awarded a prize at this year's Wellcome Image Awards for his Digital Dejerine maps, entitled 'Mapping Brain Wiring.'

http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/2015/mapping-brain-wiring

Bundles of nerve fibres inside a healthy adult living human brain. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was used to virtually slice the brain into left and right halves; the front of the head faces the left side of the image. Information on this network of connections was collected by a type of MRI (diffusion imaging) that tracks the movement of water molecules. This was then used to digitally reconstruct these connections in the brain in the style of famous French neurologist Joseph Jules Dejerine’s 19th-century anatomical drawings. Distant regions of the brain communicate with each other through this network of fibres, which are being mapped to create tools for teaching and research. This brain measures approximately 18 cm from front to back.