New brain images will have a 'major impact' on our understanding of the organ, scientists claim The Human Connectome Project released high quality images of the brain They say it will have a 'major impact' on our understanding of the organ The project aims to make advanced brain images freely available Scientists have released high quality images of the brain that they claim will have a "major impact" on our understanding of the organ. Following a five year project involving more than 100 researchers from ten institutions, the experts have released the data that they hope will enable the exploration of the relationships between brain circuits and an individual's behaviour. The Human Connectome Project, which involves scientists across Europe and the USA, aims to collect data using advanced brain imaging methods, and to make the data freely available so that scientists worldwide can make further discoveries about brain circuitry. A map of average 'functional connectivity' in human cerebral cortex An MRI scan of the brain at rest. The areas in yellow are those that are strongly linked to the area with the blue dot The initial data release includes brain imaging scans plus behavioural information - individual differences in personality, cognitive capabilities, emotional characteristics and perceptual function - obtained from 68 healthy adult volunteers. It is particularly notable because the new data is of much higher resolution, and is therefore more detailed, than data obtained by conventional brain scans. Over the next few years the number of people studied will increase until the researchers reach their final target of 1,200. The Human Connectome Project consortium is led by Dr David Van Essen, Alumni Endowed Professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. One of the 'connection maps' created by the team, which shows pathways in the brain of volunteers The project will publish all of its data online and make it accessible for researchers He said: "By making this unique data set available now, and continuing with regular data releases every quarter, the Human Connectome Project is enabling the scientific community to immediately begin exploring relationships between brain circuits and individual behaviour. The HCP will have a major impact on our understanding of the healthy adult human brain, and it will set the stage for future projects that examine changes in brain circuits underlying the wide variety of brain disorders afflicting humankind. A composite of the scans of 20 individuals. Regions in yellow and red are linked to the parietal lobe of the brain's right hemisphere Yellow and red regions are activated by a task involving listening to stories, whereas green and blue regions are more strongly activated by a task involving arithmetic calculations The data set includes information about brain connectivity in each individual, using two distinct magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) approaches. One is based on spontaneous fluctuations in functional MRI signals that occur in a complex pattern in space and time throughout the gray matter of the brain. Another, called diffusion imaging, provides information about the long-distance "wiring" - the anatomical pathways traversing the brain's white matter. Brain activations in the brain's grey matter. Yellow and red regions are activated when subjects view human faces Each subject was also scanned while performing a variety of tasks within the scanner, thereby providing extensive information about brain activation patterns. Behavioural data using a variety of tests performed outside the scanner are being released along with the scan data for each subject. The subjects are drawn from families that include siblings, some of whom are twins. This will enable studies of the heritability of brain circuits. Dr Daniel Marcus, assistant professor of radiology and director of the Neuroinformatics Research Group at Washington University School of Medicine, said: "The Human Connectome Project represents a major advance in sharing brain imaging data in ways that will accelerate the pace of discovery about the human brain in health and disease."