Harvard researchers began by collecting thousands of extremely thin cross-sectional images from a donated brain sample. The small piece of healthy brain had to be removed during surgery on a woman with epilepsy to allow surgeons to reach the part they needed to operate on. A small piece of that otherwise discarded tissue was preserved as part of an IRB-approved study for later analysis.
The Google Research team developed advanced AI tools to construct an interactive 3D model of the brain tissue. The model underscores how complex the human brain is: describing just this small sample — one-millionth of the total human brain and about 3 mm long — requires more than a million Gigabytes of data: 1.4 Petabytes. This is the largest dataset ever made of human brain structure at this resolution.