Why in News ?

Neurologists, neurosurgeons and psychiatrists in India can map the brain structure of their patients and make an accurate assessment using Indian Brain Templates (IBT) and a brain atlas developed by a team of neuroscientists from NIMHANS. NIMHANS Develops Indian Brain Templates.

What is it ?

• Brain Templates and atlas are used to provide more precise reference maps of individual patients with neurological disorders like strokes, brain tumours, and dementia.
• Also help pool information more usefully in group studies of the human brain and psychological functions, aiding our understanding of psychiatric illnesses like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), autism, substance dependence, schizophrenia, and mood disorders
• Currently we are using Montreal Neurological Index (MNI) template which is based on Caucasian brains.
  • MNI template was made by averaging 152 healthy brain scans from just a small slice of the city’s population in North America.
  • But Caucasian brains are different from Asian brains.
  • When most brain scans (MRI) are taken, they need to be compared to a standard brain template a model or standard for making comparisons from a group of individual brain scans.
  • This helps researchers identify parts of the brain.
  • A challenge for researchers is that brain size and shape differs across ages, and across regions and ethnicity and even greatly within any population.
• Some countries have their own scale to measure the brain.

NIMHANS Brain Template

• National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences have developed now is a scale that will measure an Indian brain.
• These new population and age specific Indian brain templates will allow more reliable tracking of brain development and ageing. 
• Validation experiments and comparisons with existing international templates found that using the NIMHANS IBTs for Indian brains significantly improved the accuracy of alignment.
• Also noticeably reducing distortions, errors or biases in final reports of brain structure and function.

Source : The Hindu

Topic

GS III : Achievements of Indians in science & technology; indigenization of technology and developing new technology

Current Affairs Compilation : 15 September 2020