IIT Madras Creates World's Most Detailed 3D Brain Maps

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Update of 7/15/2026: A New Brainstem Atlas Reveals Hidden Anatomy of the Human Brain "ANCHOR, a 3D human brainstem atlas, combines MRI and microscopy imaging to help researchers study neurodegenerative diseases and guide clinical applications."

(30270) IIT Madras Creates World's Most Detailed 3D Brain Maps | Vantage on Firstpost | 4K - YouTube

The researchers constructed ANCHOR using brainstem sections showing the block-face image, Nissl staining, immunohistochemistry, and anatomical annotations.

Scanning the Body with ultrasound tomography

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"... To scan an organ from all sides, UST requires the entire body part to be in contact with water. As a way of demonstrating the feasibility of their new, larger system, ... team drew inspiration from an early ultrasound system from the 1950s, in which patients were submerged in a tank of water. ..."

From the abstract:

"Ultrasonography is a vital component of modern clinical care, with handheld probes routinely used for diagnostic imaging and procedural guidance. However, handheld ultrasound imaging is limited by factors such as the partial cross-sectional field of view, operator dependency, contact-induced distortion and lack of transmission contrast.

Here we demonstrate a new system that enables whole cross-sectional ultrasound tomography of humans in both reflection and transmission modes. We generate two-dimensional images of the entire in vivo human cross-section in the abdomen and thighs with uniform in-plane resolution using a custom 512-element circular ultrasound receiver array and a rotating transmitter.

Sequential scans with our system show strong agreement with clinical magnetic resonance imaging counterparts.

To address unmet clinical needs, we explore two key applications.

First, we observe abdominal adipose distributions in our images, enabling adipose thickness assessment without ionising radiation or mechanical deformation. Second, we demonstrate an approach for video-rate biopsy needle localization with respect to internal tissue features.

These capabilities make whole cross-sectional ultrasound tomography a potential practical tool for clinical needs currently unmet by other modalities."

Scanning the Body with Sound - www.caltech.edu "Ultrasounds are a critical part of modern health care, helping to image soft tissue and organs, measure blood flow, and monitor fetal development. But the technique has constraints, including a limited field of view and the potential for operator error. To address current shortfalls and push the technology toward new applications, ... researchers have developed a system that can perform ultrasound tomography (UST) imaging on whole cross-sections of the body."

Whole cross-sectional human ultrasound tomography (no public access)

Whole Cross-Sectional Human Ultrasound Tomography (preprint, open access, first published 6/30/2023)

At left, an illustration of the ultrasound tomography (UST) system  ... While a patient is submerged in a water tank, a lab-made ring-like structure made up of 512 transducers is used to scan up and down the body and image different cross-sections.

At right, UST images of a human abdomen show how information is gathered from different types of measurements to produce images of organs and tissues inside the body.

Images of a healthy female's abdomen taken by the Wang lab's ultrasound tomography system (left) are compared to clinical MRI images of a corresponding region (right).

Self-organizing “pencil beam” laser could help scientists design brain-targeted therapies

Amazing stuff!

"... researchers discovered a paradoxical phenomenon in optical physics that could enable a new bioimaging method that’s faster and higher-resolution than existing technology.

They discovered that, under the right conditions, a chaotic mess of laser light can spontaneously self-organize into a highly focused “pencil beam.”

Using this self-organized pencil beam, the researchers captured 3D images of the human blood-brain barrier 25 times faster than the gold-standard method, while maintaining comparable resolution.

By showing individual cells absorbing drugs in real-time, this technology could help scientists test whether new drugs for neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s or ALS reach their targets in the brain, with greater speed and resolution. ..."

From the abstract:

"The formation of organized optical states in multidimensional systems is crucial for understanding light–matter interaction and advancing light-shaping technologies.

Here we report the observation of a self-localized, ultrafast pencil beam near the critical power in a standard multimode fiber.

We demonstrate that self-focusing, traditionally considered detrimental, facilitates a nonlinear spatiotemporal localized state with a sidelobe-suppressed Bessel-like profile and markedly improved stability.

Generated simply by an on-axis Gaussian launch, this beam is readily integrated into standard multiphoton microscopes.

We applied this self-localized beam to two-photon imaging of mouse enteric nervous systems, where it outperformed conventional Bessel beams through reduced sidelobes and enhanced aberration resilience.

Lastly, we monitored transferrin uptake dynamics in a live human blood–brain barrier model using minute-resolved three-dimensional scans, revealing spatiotemporal heterogeneity across different cell types.

Our findings offer a robust approach for generating ultrafast pencil beams, enabling high-throughput three-dimensional biosystem imaging to elucidate biological transport pathways."

Self-organizing “pencil beam” laser could help scientists design brain-targeted therapies | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology "MIT researchers leveraged a surprise discovery to devise a faster and more precise biomedical imaging technique."

Self-localized ultrafast pencil beam for volumetric multiphoton imaging (no public access)

Self-localized ultrafast pencil beam for volumetric multiphoton imaging (preprint, open access)

Credits: Laser widerspricht Lehrbuch? Wie sich Licht selbst fokussiert