Inspiration and composition

Using diffusion MRI (an in vivo non-invasive imaging technique), Leemans wanted to illustrate the complexities of the human brain both at a global and local level. ‘Seeing is believing, and I really wanted to show as clearly and as concise as possible this complicated underlying tissue architecture’. Images are one way that this can be done, ‘but a video can allow us to explore this architecture’. Using MATLAB, Leemans built his own software tool called ExploreDTI, which allows him to reconstruct brain pathways from a scanned image. The Tagliatelle Brain shows a virtual reconstruction of the different shapes of brain fibre pathways: ‘sheet-like shapes can be observed along the trajectory of these complex pathways reflecting the intersections with other white matter tracts’. The colours represent the orientations of the fibre tissue (red=left-right, green=front-back, blue=up-down). ‘These allow the viewer to see and appreciate the complexity of the brain’s circuitry, not only in terms of its global interconnectivity, but also with respect to its local geometrical embedding’.