News

Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) is diagnosed after an individual has tried several types of treatment for depression and their symptoms haven’t improved. The effectiveness of deep brain stimulation (DBS) as a treatment for disorders such as Parkinson’s disease has led researchers to investigate whether it could also work for psychiatric disorders such as TRD. However, depression varies significantly among individuals, and studies on DBS for TRD have also produced variable results. This points to a need to personalize DBS treatment for individuals with depression.

Study sheds light on potential for long-term, at-home use of deep brain stimulation as a treatment for neuropsychiatric disorders

By Joshua Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., and Walter Koroshetz, M.D., director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke 

Atlas and cell census represent the initial products of the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network

The NIH-led Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative continues to teach us about the world’s most sophisticated computer: the human brain. This striking image offers a spectacular case in point, thanks to a new tool called Visual Neuronal Dynamics (VND).

The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative, which is an NIH-led project aimed at revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain, happens to have generated some of the coolest—and most informative—imagery now available in neuroscience. So, throughout the month of August, I’ll share some of the entries from the initiative’s latest Show Us Your BRAINs! Photo and Video Contest.

NIH BRAIN Initiative-funded study opens the door to correlating deep brain activity and behavior

Success in flies and worms has inspired several efforts to reconstruct more complex mammalian brain circuits. Reconstructing a whole mouse brain using electron microscopy is the next logical step, but scaling from a fly to a mouse brain presents serious challenges.