Honda said many researchers tend to concentrate on getting their results published, and center members have to convince people to use their data in a new way. The foundation grant is part of the Human Brain Project, a group of 16 federal agencies that coordinates funding for research on human and animal brains. But money has gotten tighter for the center recently, mainly because of competition for brain research dollars, said John Carlis, the center's co-director and an associate professor of computer science. So far, he said, the center has worked exclusively with data on rat brains because there are few human brains available for study. He also said rat brains have the advantage of being nearly identical to each other, which means that research from different sources can be easily fit together.
Human brains have a wider variance.
One aspect of the center's work involves taking brain images and correlating them to particular brain locations. Nickolaos Papanikolopoulos, an assistant professor in computer science, matches the images using microscopes or magnetic resonance imaging, which obtains a cross-sectional image by passing charged particles through an object. The center, in collaboration with researchers in Britain, is also creating an Internet database catalog of the molecules that make brains work. Wilcox said the molecular biology database should be available sometime next month. He said the brain mapping project will allow researchers to search different areas of rat brains without leaving their homes.