Will Amazon’s Brain Mapping Technology Be A Triumph Or A Tangle Of Troubles?

Welcome to the fascinating field of Brain Mapping!

Wikipedia defines “brain mapping” as the study of the anatomy and function of the brain and spinal cord through imaging (including intra-operative, microscopic, endoscopic and multi-modality imaging), immunohistochemistry, molecular & optogenetics, stem cell and cellular biology, engineering (material, electrical and biomedical), neurophysiology and nanotechnology. Woah, that was a lot to unpack!

Yet, you may have guessed that many businesses are trying their hand at this amazing technology.

Of course, Amazon is one of them!

Researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science have collaborated with Amazon Web Services to create what has the potential to become a "transformative" new resource for the field of neuroscience, much like the Human Genome Project revolutionised modern genetics.

AWS revealed that its technology will aid the Allen Institute's Brain Knowledge Platform, an effort to create a map of the human brain. The goal of this groundbreaking platform is to compile all available information about brain cells into one accessible location, making it the largest open-source database of its kind.

Allyson Fryhoff, managing director of AWS nonprofit and nonprofit health, said, "The institute is using AWS’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services—and plans to implement generative AI in the future—to transform large, complex multimodal data into usable insights for doctors"

The statement further mentioned, "AWS machine learning empowers research organizations to uncover new connections and discoveries with purpose-built AI services, Allen is using advanced cloud technologies like ML to further accelerate their findings in a cost-effective and scalable way. We're inspired by their work to unlock never-before-seen insights about the human brain, and we look forward to the many brain research breakthroughs to come."

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Although the Allen Institute is no stranger to data, there are hundreds of billions of cells in the brain. So, creating a Brain Knowledge Platform means researchers will have to contend with massive amounts of data, which creates new challenges.

Dr. Rowland Illing, director of international public sector health at AWS added that while conducting research involving genetics and imaging, scientists often work with petabytes and even exabytes of data. Consuming 40 petabytes of data would require someone to watch 4K video for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 100 years. #SayWhat

The size of data is the most significant hurdle to this technology and Dr. Ed Lein, senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science highlighted the same by saying, “We’re just running into these enormous, enormous problems of data size, the scale of data just keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

TechDogs-"Image Of Dr. Ed Lein Talking At The Key Note."

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Will brain mapping technology unlock the secrets of our minds or will data prove to be too big a challenge? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!

First published on Wed, Jun 14, 2023

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