Taiwanese scientists have developed the world’s first ultra-high-speed four-dimensional microscope in a breakthrough that enables the observation of electric activity in living neurons.
A multidisciplinary group of researchers from National Taiwan University (NTU) and National Tsing Hua University created the technology and published a study on it with a government grant, the team told a news conference at the National Science and Technology Council yesterday.
The device is thousands of times faster than traditional microscopes and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to increase the image resolution by 10 times, study coauthor and NTU physics professor Chu Shi-wei (朱士維) said.
Photo courtesy of the National Science and Technology Council
The technology represents a leap forward in speed, resolution and image range enabling neural signal transmission to be observed with great detail in real time, compared with existing electronic microscopes that can observe only nonliving specimens, he said.
Using the novel microscope, the team monitored the brain activity of mice to discover that neurons governing motor functions were distributed in parallel, he said.
The arrangement implied that neurons can function independently or be combined to create motor movement patterns, similar to graphics processing units in computers, he said.
That means transmitting a similar signal to different neural networks would lead to distinct results in the cellular body, Chu said.
The microscope’s unprecedented capability can potentially be applied to the observation of electric signals in the human brain to benefit researchers working in neurobiology and AI-related fields, he said.
The human brain’s remarkable energy efficiency would be of interest to chipmakers to reduce the power consumption in servers, he said.
NTU professor of pharmacology Pan Ming-kai (潘明楷) said the human brain uses as little as the equivalent of 12 watts of electricity compared with generative AI, which requires up to 2 megawatts.
The microscope could additionally be used in the study of epilepsy, tremors or dementia, he added.
The study was published last month in the journal Advanced Science.
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