This year, the 29th Annual Meeting took place in Montréal, Canada, from July 22 to July 26, 2023, featuring a strong presence of Helmholtz AI. Timo Dickscheid and his team presented the Helmholtz International BigBrain Analytics and Learning Laboratory (HIBALL), along with oral and poster presentations.
HIBALL and the BigBrain Project at OHBM 2023 Annual Meeting
The Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) is the primary international society dedicated to advancing the understanding of the anatomical and functional organization of the human brain using neuroimaging. One of the aims of the society is to provide educational forums for the exchange of up-to-the-minute and groundbreaking research across neuroimaging methods and applications. OHBM achieves this through its member led committees and an Annual Meeting that is held in different locations throughout the world. About 3,000 attendees gather to attend top-notch educational programs, share the latest research and network.
This year, the 29th Annual Meeting took place in Montréal, Canada, from July 22 to July 26, 2023, featuring a strong presence of Helmholtz AI. Timo Dickscheid and his team presented the Helmholtz International BigBrain Analytics and Learning Laboratory (HIBALL) with a booth, alongside collaborators from the McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (MCIN), McGill University, Montreal, and Healthy Brain, Healthy Live (HBHL). Furthermore, HIBALL contributed to 4 talks and 16 posters during OHMB Annual Meeting 2023.
HIBALL is the funding umbrella for the BigBrain Project. It aims to transform the successful collaboration between McGill (MNI, BIC) and Forschungszentrum Jülich (INM, JSC) to the next level by reinforcing utilization and co-development of the latest AI and high-performance computing (HPC) technologies for building highly detailed 3D brain models. It establishes a close collaboration with CIFAR and MILA in Canada, and Helmholtz AI in Germany.
Neuroimaging methods rely on accurate brain models as ground truth to develop reliable approaches for probing the brain. Researchers in brain simulation and AI have a growing need for detailed descriptions of the internal organisation of brain regions in terms of local morphology, cell densities, or connectivity. Currently established computer-based 3D neuroimaging tools cannot reproduce the anatomical details available from freshly cut brains, particularly for very convoluted cortical regions and in the subcortical areas. With the advent of the BigBrain - a human post-mortem brain that has been sectioned, stained for cell bodies, scanned at very high resolution, and then digitally reconstructed in 3D (Amunts, Evans et al. 2013), we believe that there will be improvement in the precision and quality of neuroimaging support for qualitative and quantitative investigation of the brain. We aim to extend this model by further increasing its resolution and integrating multimodal data, working closely with the neuroimaging, brain modelling, and AI communities to unleash its potential for research. To enable collaboration, we build a transcontinental data sharing and computing platform in close interaction with the European "Human Brain Project" and the Canadian “Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives” program.