What's going on inside your head? This question has puzzled scientists for centuries. Under the strong support of Taiwan Brain Technology Innovation and Application Project from National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), Professor Shi-Wei Chu from the Department of Physics at National Taiwan University, Professor Shun-Chi Wu from the Department of Engineering and System Science at National Tsing Hua University, and Professor Ming-Kai Pan from the Graduate Institute of Pharmacology at National Taiwan University formed an interdisciplinary team. The team has successfully developed a set of the world's first ultra-high-speed 4D microscopes, which are combined with the state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to increase the sharpness and clarity of brain images by up to 10 times. This breakthrough research not only opens up new avenues for brain science research, but also provides a brand new revelation for the future development of AI.
The 4D microscope developed by the team is thousands of times faster than traditional microscopes, capturing fast-changing neural activities in real time. Combined with the powerful computing power of artificial intelligence, the image contrast is increased by ten times, making the originally blurred neural signals visible and successfully overcoming the limitations of traditional microscopes in terms of speed, resolution, and imaging range. In the living mouse brain, the team found that the distribution of neurons controlling movement is like GPUs, which are arranged in parallel to carry out computation. Even if the signals received by the neighboring neural networks are similar, the transmission of the signals to the cellular body will result in different outcomes. These findings have been published in the prestigious international journal, Advanced Science (https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202405293)
The team's technical advancements not only shed light on the mystery of how the brain operates via functional computations, but also potentially pave the way for AI development through better understanding of the brain emergent properties, leading to a synergistic dance between neuroscience and AI.
