On the development of a brain simulator

Abstract

Developing a whole brain simulator, a computer simulation in modeling brain structure and functionality of human, is the ultimate goal of Brain Informatics. Brain simulator helps researchers cross the bridge between the cognitive behavior/decease, and the neurophysiology. Brain simulators development is still in infant stage. Current simulators mostly consider the neuron as the basic functional component. This paper starts with introducing the background and current status of brain simulator. Then, an extensible brain simulator development framework is proposed. From information technology perspective, we adopt overlay and peer-to-peer network to deal with the complexity of brain network. Moreover, layered design with object-oriented brain class hierarchy forms the flexible development framework of the proposed simulator. The proposed brain simulator is evolved in case-based incremental delivery style. The power of the simulator will grow along with more research cases from cognitive and clinical neuroscience. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.