LONDON: One of the last frontiers of the unexplored left on earth, the living human brain, is yielding up its secrets to a new tool developed in the UK.

The revolutionary development allows researchers to see clearly the networks of nerve fibres — “white matter” — which link the different, thinking units of the brain, or “grey matter.” Known as Vivid, for Virtual In-Vivo Interactive Dissection, the system harmlessly picks out patterns of nerve connections inside the brains of living people.

The pathways are uncannily similar to those which previously could only be pictured by a draughtsman, laboriously sketching the bisected brains of the dead.

Vivid is already being used to voyage into the brains of 30 British sufferers of schizophrenia, in a bid to solve one of the greatest of medicine’s mental mysteries: are schizophrenics wired up differently to the rest of the population, and if so, how? Developed by a team at the Institute of Psychology, part of London University’s King’s College, Vivid has the potential to enable breakthroughs in the understanding of a range of other conditions, including alcoholism, motor neuron disease, dyslexia, Alzheimer’s, and multiple sclerosis.

It will enable scientists to see how the brain’s wiring changes as children grow up and when we get old. Ultimately, it will help doctors diagnose illnesses of the brain.

“When I show this to some psychiatrists, they go a bit crazy, because this is exactly what they want to look at,” said Dr Derek Jones, 29, the physicist who led development of Vivid.

One of the virtues of Vivid is that it requires no new hardware, just a reprogramming of the existing MRI (magnetic resonance imager) scanners. Vivid is a refinement of a technique originally proposed by US scientists in the early 1990s.

The King’s College team is not the only group working on this type of imaging. But it is the only one whose system is capable of picking out individual bundles of nerve fibres at the resolution necessary to trace their exact route from one part of the brain to another.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service