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Researchers are using EBRAINS to generate personalised virtual brain twins of patients that may transform the treatment of schizophrenia. Their innovative approach, which combines advanced neuroscience, modelling, AI, and high-performance computing, could pave the way for more effective, tailored therapies for one of the world’s most challenging mental health conditions.

Researchers at INM‑1 have developed a new method to visualize the fine structure of the brain without elaborate laboratory procedures. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), they can now virtually show how nerve cells are distributed and how they connect with nerve fibers. The study was published in Imaging Neuroscience.

Researchers from the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) and the Cécile and Oskar Vogt Institute for Brain Research have remapped the human premotor cortex, identifying seven clearly distinguishable subareas. The new histologically high-resolution maps show how the different regions are anatomically delineated. This new subdivision helps clarify the functional differences between these regions. The new maps are available in the Julich Brain Atlas, a core component of EBRAINS—the European digital research platform for neuroscience. The study has now been published in Communications Biology.

An international team of researchers has successfully applied the recently developed imaging technique ComSLI (Computational Scattered Light Imaging) to brain sections prepared using a wide range of methods, enabling the visualization of the brain’s complex fiber network with micrometer precision. This achievement marks an important advance that opens new possibilities for neuroscience and biomedical research—such as renewed, in-depth analyses of existing tissue sections. Their findings have now been published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.

The Jülich Brain Atlas is now the new standard atlas in AFNI, a widely used open-source tool for analyzing and visualizing functional MRI data. The atlas is an important resource for the neuroimaging community and provides detailed parcellations of brain regions based on microstructure.

Researchers have conducted a detailed study and re-mapping of the so-called premotor cortex in the brain, which controls movements and cognitive processes. The new maps have enabled the precise localization of the anatomical correlates of the so-called eye fields for the first time. 

A research team has used the Julich-Brain Atlas to uncover neuroanatomical correlates of antisocial behaviour.

In a new study in Nature Communications, scientists from Canada, Great Britain and Germany have used the Julich Brain Atlas and high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging to study patterns of organization across the whole brain and on the microstructure. The atlas is an open and interactive ressource available to neuroscientists on the digital EBRAINS research infrastructure. The results highlight an interplay between local brain areas with distinct structural and functional profiles, and global patterns which span the whole brain as cortical gradients.

The brain’s default mode network is a group of regions that become active when we are not engaged with our surroundings – for instance, when daydreaming. Researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany have now investigated the structure and function of this network by analysing brain tissue and applying advanced magnetic resonance imaging techniques.

Using the BigBrain, which is available on the EBRAINS research infrastructure, the study revealed microstructural differences that influence how the default mode network communicates with other regions of the brain. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.