The Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology in Warsaw has made available the world’s largest collection of scans of human brain preparations. The Digital Brain platform was created for doctors, scientists of various specialities, psychologists, students, and all people interested in neuroscience. The project worth over PLN 7.3 million is co-financed by the European Union.

According to the Academic Forum, Digital Brain is a project to digitize the resources of the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology, which have been collected for over half a century. The Institute – in cooperation with the Project Center Centrum – Digital Poland and the Ministry of Digitization – has created a tool enabling open access to the collected archival material of the Department of Neuropathology, containing thousands of brain scans.

In the digital archive, researchers can see many examples of the physiological changes in the brain caused by Huntington’s, Creutzfeldt-Jakob, Alzheimer’s diseases and Down’s syndrome. These resources are available around the clock to people in the world. The collection of brain preparations made according to European scientific standards has been created since the middle of the last century.

The Digital Brain platform is a tool that was created to expand knowledge about the pathomechanisms of brain diseases and to develop effective therapeutic strategies. Thanks to the platform, scientists and doctors will have easy access to scientific and educational materials in the form of medical data for many diseases. Dr Tomasz Stępień, head of the Digital Brain project, adds that the archive of preparations collected by the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology will not only maintain but will be developed – already in digital form.

The Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology was established in 1951 on the initiative of a group of psychiatrists and neurobiologists, including Jerzy Konorski, an eminent neurophysiologist. Currently, it is a leading research center in Poland specializing in the development of new methods of treatment and rehabilitation of mental and neurological disorders. It owns modern diagnostic and clinical facilities, enabling the diagnosis and treatment of neurological and mental diseases.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński