Blue Brain

The Blue Brain is a method for creating a synthetic brain using the method of reverse-engineering. Brain and Mind Institute founded Blue Brain in May 2005. The main aim of the Blue Brain project was to study the architectural and functional principles brain. Blue Brain was guided by the Institute's director Henry Markram. The goal of the Blue Brain project is to simulate the rat neocortical column which is the smallest functional unit of the neocortex. Blue Brain also builds a detailed and functional simulation of the physiological processes in the human brain. There are a few objectives of Blue Brain which are important. Blue Brain builds a correct software replica or template.

Actually, the Blue Brain Project was started in June 2005. The goal of Blue Brain was to structure the neocortical column for the mammals. This would underlies all sensory and cognitive processing. Another goal of the Blue Brain is to reconstruct the various pieces of brain and building a virtual brain in a supercomputer. This virtual brain is a very good tool. This would provide neuroscientists to understand the brain and neurological diseases. The Blue Brain project was agreed by the EPFL and IBM institutions. The process of the Blue Brain was that rat cortical column was simulated. Blue Brain can be considered as a resounding success.

Goals

Now let us point out the objectives to achieve the goals of Blue Brain Project.  As we have discussed earlier the goal of Blue Brain project is to reverse engineer using the mammalian brain. In order to achieve this very important goal, the Blue Brain project has provides themselves with four key objectives. These objectives include:

1.     First we need to create a Brain Simulation Facility. This would be done with the ability to build models of the healthy and diseased brain. This need to be built at different scales having different levels of details in different species.

2.     Then we have to thoroughly demonstrate the feasibility and value of this strategy. For this you have to create and validate a biologically detailed model of the neocortical column in the somatosensory cortex of young rats.

3.     By using this model, you have to discover basic principles governing the structure and function of the brain.

4.     Lastly exploit these principles for creating larger and more detailed brain models. From this you would be able to develop strategies to model the complete human brain.

Strategy

There are some important strategies for the Blue Brain project. This only depends on two key elements. The elements are as discussed below:

The first key element is the creation of a Brain Simulation Facility. This can be integrated with the complete process of producing brain models. This can vary from acquisition of data from neuroscience experiments. It also varies from literature through the data basing and analysis of this data to model-building. Other process includes simulation and the analysis and visualization of the results. For this process it requires require the development of detailed workflows and specialized software applications. It needs to be done is every stages of the process. The creation and continuous updating of the necessary technological infrastructure are also importantly required. The infrastructure can be described as the state-of-the art set-ups for the acquisition of experimental data and massive supercomputers. These massive supercomputers can be used for simulation, neuroinformatics, data analysis, model building and scientific visualization.

The second element of the goal or the strategy is the systematic search for basic principles of design. This design makes it possible for the goal to predict specific features of the brain. This can be done without measuring them directly. Various examples have been included in this. Some of them are prediction of the distribution of ion channels from neurons’ electrical behaviour. The other is the prediction of microcircuit connectivity from data on neuron morphology. Thus due to this reason the Blue Brain project is called as the predictive reverse engineering.