cat.economica – Mint Labs, the ‘Google Maps’ of the brain
Mint Labs is featured in the Catalan economic news site cat.economica
It starts with a great moment in neuroscience:
In 1988 a curious affair was published in Physicians Weekly, a British journal of psychiatry. It was the case of a man who five years earlier had attempted suicide because he felt very unhinged by the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) suffering, a disease that forced him to hand washing and showering several times a day, to the point to seriously affect his daily life. The 19-year-old shot himself in the head and surprisingly survived. But even more surprising was that the bullet passed through the left frontal lobe of the brain and destroyed just part of his brain that caused the TOC. After recovering, doctors noticed that the boy no longer showed an obsessive behavior and could return to rebuild his life normally. The brain is a box full of surprises, and better said, because it is the organ which specialists know the least. However, about 40% of the European population suffers every year from some form of neurological or mental illness, so much interest in deciphering operation.
To contribute their grain of sand in this work, Paulo Rodrigues and Vesna Prchkovska, PhD in biomedical engineering and imaging, launched Mint Labs, a cloud platform that is able to generate 3D maps of the brain.