Michael Sughrue, cofounder, Stephen Scheeler and Stephane Doyen, cofounder of Omniscient Neurotechnology, which creates brain mapsWhen Michael Sughrue was studying medicine in the early 2000s, surgeons didn’t have a full picture of the brain. While MRI and CT scans could spot structural abnormalities, they couldn’t tell how brain cells, known as neurons,were connected or how they communicated. “I didn’t want to hurt people when we did brain surgery.
With approximately 86 billion neurons wired together in convoluted electrical circuits, the brain is the most complex human organ. Brain maps can help doctors spot abnormal connections, the misfiring of neurons in patients with brain tumors, neurodegenerative conditions, anxiety and depression, Sughrue, 42, says. It also helps map human emotions and intellect.
The technology to map neuronal connections in the brain, also called a connectome, was developed by applying machine learning algorithms to tens of thousands of MRI scans. “It is like Google Maps of the brain,” explains Omniscient’s CEO Stephen Scheeler, who was previously the CEO of Facebook for Australia and New Zealand.
Omniscient is not the first to develop brain maps, but it perhaps the first to commercialize its use. The National Institutes of Health supported the Human Connectome Project, which was launched in 2009, to map the human brain. Based on the data from the project, two universities built a custom “Connectome” scanner with MRI technology that can visualize the brain’s networks in 10-fold higher detail than conventional scanners, according to a 2016 NIH press release.