Human Brain Project

Neuroscience is expanding nationally and internationally. The 90's were proclaimed "Decade of the Brain" by the US Congress, and a large funding program the so-called "Human Brain Project" was established.
Nationally the Danish Research Councils created a substantial funding program
for Interdisciplinary Neuroscience. New technology is key to the growth of neuroscience and engineering and informatics competences are of vital importance for large neuroscience projects.
The DTU Human Brain Project group collaborates with an international consortium of researchers from leading neuroscience labs in the USA and Japan on new data analytic strategies for functional neuroimaging. In the 1996 the group was funded by the US Human Brain Project and by the Danish Research Councils.
Functional neuroimaging by Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is opening a new window to the working human brain. These brain scan techniques provide highly complex data sets. The scans are indirect measures of brain activity while subjects perform well defined mental tasks. The work of the DTU group concerns basic signal processing, pattern recognition and visualization.
A fast volume "warp" algorithm was developed for co-registration of PET brain scans using anatomical MRI applied to co-registration of PET group studies at Rigshospitalet, University of Copenhagen. Markov Field methods were developed for edge preserving smoothing of PET scans. Artificial neural network models were designed, evaluated, and visualized for detection of brain activation in PET scans under saccadic eye movements. Noise levels in PET scans were analyzed. A number of data analytic strategies for fMRI were compared on data sets from Massachusetts General Hospital. Artificial neural networks were used to estimate Glucose Metabolism from dynamic PET scans.