Articles

The Brain Observatory at UC San Diego has launched an extraordinary endeavor. Dr. Jacopo Annese and his team of researchers are establishing a digital brain bank to explore the relationship between mind and brain.

Postmortem MR imaging has revealed widespread deep White Matter pathology localized primarily in the frontal lobes. Histopathological staining will elucidate the nature of the abnormal WM signal revealed by MRI sequences; however, for the time being (in Phase 1), our main concern is histotechnical.

We believe that the enormous attention that was devoted to patient H.M. when he was living and generously served as a keen research subject ought to be matched by a similarly involved study of his brain.

Histological sections are going to be stored cryogenically in serial order. We have set the goal to acquire an image of the specimen’s blockface before each section is collected. To that effect, in order to eliminate the possibility of human error during the very long procedure, we have made image acquisition completely automatic.