Scientists design brain analysis chip, inspired by space exploration

SHANGHAI -- A group of Chinese brain scientists got inspired by space exploration and designed a real-time analysis system for whole-brain imaging of zebrafish, a model animal used in biomedical research to mimic biological processes or diseases found in humans.

The revolutionary neural recording technology has enabled dynamic measurements of large-scale neuronal clusters, but the subsequent real-time analysis of those massive dynamical imaging data remains a challenge.

The researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences realized that high-throughput neural data analysis is similar to how scientists deal with fast radio burst observations in astronomical research.

Emulating the processing approach of mysterious radio flashes in the universe, they developed a specific chip designed with a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and a graphics processing unit (GPU) for an up to 500-megabyte-per-second image stream.

According to a study published on Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the FPGA-GPU system can timely extract activities from up to 100,000 neurons in awake larval zebrafish.

The researchers also demonstrated an effective brain-computer interface strategy using the real-time system. It adjusted the activities of swimming-control neurons of zebrafish in a state of paralysis.