Micro Meso And Macro Connectomics Of The Brain

This book has brought together leading investigators who work in the new arena of brain connectomics. This includes ‘macro-connectome’ efforts to comprehensively chart long-distance pathways and functional networks; ‘micro-connectome’ efforts to identify every neuron, axon, dendrite, synapse, and glial process within restricted brain regions; and ‘meso-connectome’ efforts to systematically map both local and long-distance connections using anatomical tracers. This book highlights cutting-edge methods that can accelerate progress in elucidating static ‘hard-wired’ circuits of the brain as well as dynamic interactions that are vital for brain function. The power of connectomic approaches in characterizing abnormal circuits in the many brain disorders that afflict humankind is considered. Experts in computational neuroscience and network theory provide perspectives needed for synthesizing across different scales in space and time. Altogether, this book provides an integrated view of the challenges and opportunities in deciphering brain circuits in health and disease.

This book brings together leading investigators who represent various aspects of brain dynamics with the goal of presenting state-of-the-art current progress and address future developments. The individual chapters cover several fascinating facets of contemporary neuroscience from elementary computation of neurons, mesoscopic network oscillations, internally generated assembly sequences in the service of cognition, large-scale neuronal interactions within and across systems, the impact of sleep on cognition, memory, motor-sensory integration, spatial navigation, large-scale computation and consciousness. Each of these topics require appropriate levels of analyses with sufficiently high temporal and spatial resolution of neuronal activity in both local and global networks, supplemented by models and theories to explain how different levels of brain dynamics interact with each other and how the failure of such interactions results in neurologic and mental disease. While such complex questions cannot be answered exhaustively by a dozen or so chapters, this volume offers a nice synthesis of current thinking and work-in-progress on micro-, meso- and macro- dynamics of the brain.

Fundamentals of Brain Network Analysis is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to methods for unraveling the extraordinary complexity of neuronal connectivity. From the perspective of graph theory and network science, this book introduces, motivates and explains techniques for modeling brain networks as graphs of nodes connected by edges, and covers a diverse array of measures for quantifying their topological and spatial organization. It builds intuition for key concepts and methods by illustrating how they can be practically applied in diverse areas of neuroscience, ranging from the analysis of synaptic networks in the nematode worm to the characterization of large-scale human brain networks constructed with magnetic resonance imaging. This text is ideally suited to neuroscientists wanting to develop expertise in the rapidly developing field of neural connectomics, and to physical and computational scientists wanting to understand how these quantitative methods can be used to understand brain organization. Extensively illustrated throughout by graphical representations of key mathematical concepts and their practical applications to analyses of nervous systems Comprehensively covers graph theoretical analyses of structural and functional brain networks, from microscopic to macroscopic scales, using examples based on a wide variety of experimental methods in neuroscience Designed to inform and empower scientists at all levels of experience, and from any specialist background, wanting to use modern methods of network science to understand the organization of the brain

The brain has been viewed as an organ, machine, biological computer, and nervous system component. What are its major parts and how are they interconnected to generate thinking, feelings, and behaviour? Designed for undergraduates in neuroscience, this work surveys 2500 years of scientific thinking about these questions from the perspective of fundamental architectural principles. It proposes an alternative model for the basic plan of neural systems organization based on an explosion of structural data from the neuroanatomy revolution of the 1970s. Possible relationships between neural networks and gene networks revealed by the human genome project are also explored.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on Multimodal Brain Image Analysis, held in conjunction with MICCAI 2011, in Toronto, Canada, in September 2011. The 15 revised full papers presented together with 4 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 24 submissions. The objective of this workshop is to facilitate advancements in the multimodal brain image analysis field, in terms of analysis methodologies, algorithms, software systems, validation approaches, benchmark datasets, neuroscience, and clinical applications.

Human brain imaging, connectomics, network analysis, and neuroinformatics are just some of the important current arenas in neuroscience addressed here. The book solves a fundamental problem by supplying the first global, historically documented, hierarchically organized human nervous system parts list. This defined vocabulary accurately and systematically describes every human nervous system structural feature that can be observed with current imaging methods, and provides an extendible framework for describing accurately the nervous system in all animals including invertebrates and vertebrates alike. Research for the book began in the late 1990s when the lack of a systematic vocabulary for neuroanatomy became a critical problem in developing databases and online knowledge management systems for the NIH Human Brain Project (1995-2005), which grew out of the Institute of Medicine's Committee on a National Neural Circuitry Database (1989). One outcome of this research was the publication with Mihail Bota in 2011 of a Foundational Model of Connectivity. It provides the conceptual framework for this book, which is divided into three main parts. The first consists of four chapters discussing the rationale behind the Lexicon of nervous system parts, historical trends in the evolution of neuroanatomical concepts and nomenclature, the development of hierarchical nomenclature tables, and practical notes on using the Lexicon. The second part is the Lexicon itself, with separate entries for 1,381 standard terms. Each standard term has a textual definition including the method used for identification, age, sex, and species to which it applies, and a citation to the first use of the term as so defined. Each entry also has, where appropriate, chronological lists of nonstandard terms (10,928 in all): translations, alternate spellings, earlier delineations before naming, earlier synonyms, later synonyms, and partly corresponding terms. The third part is a set of 10 hierarchical nomenclature tables of nervous system standard terms.

This open access book summarizes the multi-disciplinary results of one of China’s main primatological research projects on the endemic Tibetan macaque (Macaca thibetana), which had continued for over 30 years, but which had never been reported on systematically. Dedicated to this exceptional Old World monkey, this book makes the work of Chinese primatologists on the social behavior, cooperation, culture, cognition, group dynamics, and emerging technologies in primate research accessible to the international scientific community. One of the most impressive Asian monkeys, and the largest member of its genus, the Tibetan macaque deserves to be better known. This volume goes a long way towards bringing this species into the spotlight with many excellent behavioral analyses from the field. - Frans de Waal, Professor of Psychology, Emory University, USA. Macaques matter. To understand primate patterns and trends, and to gain important insight into humanity, we need to augment and expand our engagement with the most successful and widespread primate genus aside from Homo. This volume focuses on the Tibetan macaque, a fascinating species with much to tell us about social behavior, physiology, complexity and the macaque knack for interfacing with humans. This book is doubly important for primatology in that beyond containing core information on this macaque species, it also reflects an effective integrated collaboration between Chinese scholars and a range of international colleagues—exactly the type of collaborative engagement primatology needs. This volume is a critical contribution to a global primatology. - Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame, USA. I have many fond memories of my association with Mt. Huangshan research beginning in 1983, when together with Professor Qishan Wang we established this site. It is such a beautiful place and I miss it. It is gratifying to see how far research has progressed since we began work there, becoming more internationalized and very much a collaborative endeavor under the long-term direction of Professor Jin-Hua Li and colleagues. This book highlights the increased interest in this species, representing a variety of disciplines ranging from macro aspects of behavior, cognition and sociality, to micro aspects of microbes, parasites and disease, authored by a group of renowned Chinese and international primatologists. I applaud their efforts and expect more interesting work to come from this site in the years ahead. - Kazuo Wada, Professor Emeritus, Kyoto University, Japan.

A pioneer in the field outlines new empirical and computational approaches to mapping the neural connections of the human brain. Crucial to understanding how the brain works is connectivity, and the centerpiece of brain connectivity is the connectome, a comprehensive description of how neurons and brain regions are connected. In this book, Olaf Sporns surveys current efforts to chart these connections—to map the human connectome. He argues that the nascent field of connectomics has already begun to influence the way many neuroscientists collect, analyze, and think about their data. Moreover, the idea of mapping the connections of the human brain in their entirety has captured the imaginations of researchers across several disciplines including human cognition, brain and mental disorders, and complex systems and networks. Discovering the Human Connectome offers the first comprehensive overview of current empirical and computational approaches in this rapidly developing field.