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In a major effort to visualize the brain's superhighways, 100 researchers across 10 institutions are close to wrapping up the 5-year, US$30-million Human Connectome Project (HCP), funded by the US National Institutes of Health¹. By early 2016, they expect to complete MRI scans on 1,200 healthy young adults. They recruited twins — both identical and fraternal — and their non-twin siblings to investigate how patterns in brain connectivity might be inherited; they also collected data such as IQ scores and smoking habits to look for correlations with the connectome. By the end of the project, they will have amassed a petabyte's (10¹⁵) worth of pictures.

HCP researchers image the basic structure of the brain and bundles of axon fibres. They measure blood oxygen levels across the brain as an indicator of activity, looking for areas that fire as people perform tasks or just zone out. Brain areas that are active at the same time are likely to work together.

To get the most information out of each subject, HCP collaborators worked with Siemens Healthcare in Erlangen, Germany, to soup up a standard MRI scanner. It generates a 3-tesla magnetic field — comparable to that in standard machines — but can control the field more precisely. MRI scanners use gradients of magnetic fields to aim at parts of the brain, and the stronger gradient of the HCP machine offers faster imaging and better resolution. That creates more-detailed images of axon bundles. A version of their machine is now available commercially, known as the MAGNETOM Prisma.

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