Los Angeles, Aug. 12 (Reuters): A computerised “atlas” of the brain is for the first time giving researchers and medical experts a map for unlocking the puzzles of the mind.

The 10-year project “was born out of frustration”, said John Mazziotta, chair of the department of neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles, medical school. “Unfortunately, the brain is different in every single person. There is a tremendous amount of variance.”

As a result, researchers and radiologists have essentially relied on their own experience to measure brain activity or diagnose disease.

But the atlas, which the researchers recently started making available for use, will allow specialists to compare a patient’s brain with those in the database. This may enable them to detect crucial differences in the brains of sick people and thus diagnose and treat them.

An international research consortium, led by Mazziotta and Arthur Toga, director of UCLA’s laboratory of neuro imaging, has so far gathered digital images of 7,000 brains using technology such as magnetic resonance imaging scans. The scans taken of the brains of people mainly between the ages of 20 and 40 are colourised, animated and otherwise enhanced.

The participants included healthy people as well as individuals suffering from Alzheimer’s, autism, schizophrenia and foetal alcohol syndrome. “What scientists do is take things apart and study one little thing at a time.... This atlas allows us to put it all together again,” said Toga, who calls the brain “the last great frontier of human biology”.

The atlas, available online at www.loni.ucla.edu/ICBM, enables brain experts worldwide to access four-dimensional details — time as well as the three dimensions of space — of brain structure and function, descriptions of how the brain changes as we age and how and where neurological disease occurs.

The project is funded by several sources, including the National Institutes of Health. “Eventually, it will be used to compare against disease populations. It will give clinicians more confidence in a diagnosis,” Toga said.

The project consists of high-definition structural maps of individual brains based on age, race, gender, educational background, genetic composition and other distinguishing characteristics.

Layered over the anatomical maps are animations of brain functions such as memory, emotion, language and speech. Users can look at individual brain pictures, composite pictures of subgroups by, for example, age or gender or as a composite of all 7,000 participants.

Toga has overseen brain scans of hundreds who tested within a typical range on measures such as blood pressure and pulse. Scans were taken while the subjects were at rest and while they performed tasks to capture how the brain responds to stimuli.