World’s largest fetal-brain mapping dataset is being built here in India! | Dr Richa Verma on S2E10

we are able to go equivalent of that house level within the brain, which is at cell level, but across the whole brain.

It sounds simple to say imaging of a human brain.

Yep.

Uh, and but it's a huge engineering challenge.

Yes. Currently, the largest, most detailed brain map of the developing human brain in second trimester.

So the Dharani dataset for each brain, we'll be able to track these eighty billion odd neurons?

It's in the largest collection in the world.

Hi, this is Amrit. We are at IIT Madras, my alma mater, and India's top university for people who like to build. We are here to meet some builders, ask them: "What are you building? What does it take to build? And what makes IIT Madras the best place to build?" [upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to the Best Place to Build Podcast. Today, we have with us Dr Richa Verma, chief scientific officer of the Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre at IIT Madras, which does brain imaging. We'll learn about it. It does brain imaging at point five micron level or cellular level. The research group has a wet lab, an engineering lab, an optics lab, an imaging lab, a software team, and an ana- analytics team. So it's a large team, multidisciplinary. Um, Dr Richa, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Amrit. Thanks for having me here.

Uh, Doctor, I have to ask you, what is brain mapping, uh, what is brain imaging, and why do we need it?

Okay, that's, uh, good and something good to start this conversation with. When we talk about human brain, or any brain for that matter, it's an organ which is very heterogeneous, which means, uh, it has different cell types, there are different regions. So to understand the brain, you want to know how these cells are organized and how each of these organization makes different brain regions. So just like world map, you identify different countries, states, towns, and cities, and you then create maps, right? And then you put different countries map together to create the big atlas. If you remember in your school, you would have, in geography, the atlas-

Mm

... which would comprise maps of different countries. So same way, we are creating human brain maps, where we have detailed information about different brain regions, and we-- when we put all of this together, what we are doing is generating brain atlases.

Nice. You gave me the analogy earlier of, uh, moving from an atlas to something like Google Maps.

Yes-

Uh, so-

Or the other way around. [chuckles]

Right.

Okay. [chuckles]

So in, in, in, in the sense, what I want to understand is... I mean, in the introduction, I read that it's at a point five micron level. How much does the impact of the resolution matter?

Okay, so the closest analogy, which works with a lot of people, we have had world maps for centuries, right? People used to navigate from one country to the other, and those maps have also evolved over a period of time. Now, if you compare the world map two hundred years ago versus what you see in Google Map-