In 2024, a team of 287 researchers completed a full brain mapping of an adult animal (a Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly) and published their results in Nature.
Many of these studies also have technical problems like small sample size or poor equipment calibration which means they cannot be reproduced - considerations which are sometimes ignored to produce a sensational journal article or news headline.
In some cases the brain mapping techniques are used for commercial purposes, lie detection, or medical diagnosis in ways which have not been scientifically validated.
[6][page needed] In the late 1980s in the United States, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science was commissioned to establish a panel to investigate the value of integrating neuroscientific information across a variety of techniques.
[7][page needed] Of specific interest is using structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), diffusion MRI (dMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), electroencephalography (EEG), positron emission tomography (PET), Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and other non-invasive scanning techniques to map anatomy, physiology, perfusion, function and phenotypes of the human brain.
Both healthy and diseased brains may be mapped to study memory, learning, aging, and drug effects in various populations such as people with schizophrenia, autism, and clinical depression.
[18][19][20] In 2024, FlyWire, a team of 287 researchers spanning 76 institutions completed a brain mapping, or connectome, of an adult animal (a Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly) and published their results in Nature.
[23][24] Later that year, scientists combined electron microscopy and brainbow imaging to show for the first time the development of a mammalian neural circuit.
[25] In August 2021, scientists of the MICrONS program, launched in 2016,[26] published a functional connectomics dataset that "contains calcium imaging of an estimated 75,000 neurons from primary visual cortex (VISp) and three higher visual areas (VISrl, VISal and VISlm), that were recorded while a mouse viewed natural movies and parametric stimuli".