Blue Brain at Neuroscience 2024: Unveiling of Simulation Platform
© 2024 EPFL
The Blue Brain Project is set to conclude at the end of 2024, bringing to a close nearly two decades of pioneering work aimed at establishing simulation neuroscience as an essential complement to experimental and theoretical research. To celebrate this milestone, the project previewed the Blue Brain Open Platform—a comprehensive suite of tools, data, and algorithms developed throughout the initiative—at the largest annual neuroscience conference.
Neuroscience 2024, held earlier this October, attracted more than 22,000 scientists and hundreds of exhibitors, providing an ideal stage for Blue Brain to unveil its forthcoming simulation neuroscience platform. Compiled across nearly 300 publications and representing 1 petabyte of data, its resources include 260+ public repositories, over 5,000 reconstructed morphologies, more than 100k electrophysiological recordings and hundreds of electrophysiological models. It also features highly detailed models of brain regions, along with hundreds of in-vitro simulation experiments that can be re-executed—all integrated into a single, user-friendly platform for the neuroscience community.
Close to 200 participants attended Blue Brain’s hands-on workshops, where they explored the platform’s capabilities and discussed use-cases, ahead of its formal launch in 2025. Key features of the platform include:
- Exploration of a detailed mouse brain atlas, enhanced with an AI assistant
- Access to experimental datasets from mouse brain studies as well as models
- Tools to leverage existing models or create custom ones tailored to specific research questions
- Virtual Labs for designing and executing simulation experiments
In addition to the workshop, more than 600 visitors engaged with the Blue Brain booth, where the full range of simulation neuroscience tools was on display. One of Blue Brain’s lead investigators presented at a minisymposium focused on rapidly advancing areas of neuroscience, while the team showcased 17 posters highlighting the latest research findings.
Blue Brain’s groundbreaking work has laid a solid foundation for research applications using simulation neuroscience. The launch of the Blue Brain Open Platform in 2025 will provide the neuroscience community with access to a vast and integrated suite of data, models, and tools, streamlining research efforts and enabling more sophisticated simulation experiments, while enhancing collaboration between scientists.