A single brain is unfathomably complex. So brain researchers, whether they’re looking at datasets built from 300,000 neurons in 81 mice or from MRIs of 1,200 young adults, are now dealing with so much information that they must also come up with new methods to comprehend it. Developing new analysis tools has become as important as using them to understand brain health and development.
A team including researchers at the University of Washington recently used new software to compare MRIs from 300 babies and discovered that myelin, a part of the brain’s so-called white matter, develops much slower after birth. The researchers published their findings Aug. 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
UW News spoke with senior author Ariel Rokem, a UW research associate professor in the psychology department and a data science fellow in the eScience Institute, about the paper and his research approach.
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