Exploring the brain forest

Exploring the Brain Forest, a virtual environment currently in design, pres ents hierarchical views of the brain at several levels of scale from a glob al overview to immersion within its forest of neurons and glial cells. The virtual environment provides a 3D graphical model of brain data sets drawn from microscopy of human brain tissue mapped at the limit of optical resolu tion. The virtual environment is framed in a finite element model of the ce rebral cortex. This solid model is implanted with a database of neurons, ei ther traced biological neurons or synthetically generated neurons. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.