After six years of efforts, Chinese scientists have finished mapping the human brain in collaborative effort with foreign experts, which is totally new and will provide an indispensable tool for the study of the relationship between the brain and behavior.

Human Brain mapping is the cornerstone of understanding of brain structure and function. The most widely used human brain mapping is Brodmann's map which was made 100 years ago and is based on a single person's body tissue using cytoarchitecture. 

Although in recent years, scientists have used magnetic resonance imaging technology to map the human brain, yet the map is divided roughly and difficult to correspond with the function of the brain.

The scientists from the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) have broken the 100-year-old bottlenecks of traditional mapping of the human brain and have proposed new ideas and methods, including use of brain structure and information regarding function connections to map the human brain. The totally new mapping includes 246 sub-regions, four to five times as detailed as Brodamann’s mapping and it firstly maps the connection of the whole human brain of a living body in a macroscopic manner. 

Fan Lingzhong, associate professor of the CAS, said the mapping can provide the connection mode of every sub-region and structure, which will become an indispensable tool for the study of the relationship between the brain and behavior, and for finding new ways to understand the structure and function of the human brain. This has important implications for the design of digital brains inside smart systems. 

It will also help to locate areas damaged by strokes and epileptic foci, and in the precise removal of glimoas during neurosurgical operations.