IIT Madras Sets Out to Map 100 Human Brains at Cellular Resolution
PM Modi dedicated IIT Madras's Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre to the nation and launched a global mission to map more than 100 human brains, alongside C-STROKE, a new ischaemic stroke atlas.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday, 11 October, dedicated the Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre at IIT Madras to the nation and launched a global mission to map more than 100 human brains at cellular resolution.
What the mission will do
The aim is a set of three-dimensional atlases of the human brain across the lifespan, from the foetal stage to old age. The maps are meant to show researchers worldwide the brain's cellular architecture in detail and to support work on neurological disorders.
At the same event, the centre released C-STROKE, described as a first-of-its-kind atlas of human ischaemic stroke. It contains more than 1,000 annotated microscopic sections from a stroke-affected brain, intended to help scientists find therapeutic targets and understand the tissue damage when a blockage cuts off blood flow to part of the brain.
What the centre has built so far
The centre was set up in March 2022 with support from Sudha and Kris Gopalakrishnan. It combines neuroscience, engineering, advanced imaging and computational science, and its whole-brain imaging platform lets scientists examine cellular structures across large volumes of tissue.
Two earlier releases show the scale of the work:
- DHARANI (2024): a 3D atlas of the human foetal brain built from digital images of 5,132 brain sections.
- ANCHOR (June 2026): a 3D atlas of the human brainstem mapping more than 200 nuclei and fibre tracts.
The new mission extends that work to a collection of brain maps covering different life stages, which the centre plans to make available to the international research community.
Why it matters for Tamil Nadu's tech story
Most of the state's technology news is about factories, GCCs and data centres. This is something else: a large, annotated scientific dataset produced in Chennai and meant for researchers everywhere. AI work in medicine depends on datasets like this, and they take years to build. The centre has been at it since 2022, and this mission is the biggest step yet.
Source: DT Next: Bid to map 100 human brains: PM Modi unveils IIT-Madras's global mission