3D microscopy to help crack Alzheimer's secrets

Scientists have edged closer to cracking Parkinson's and Alzheimer's secrets with the help of cutting edge 3D microscopy.

Underwritten by neural network algorithms (artificial intelligence), the cutting-edge technology is expected to be widely used in disease research in the near future.

It will permit the automated identification, separation and analysis of cells as complex as brain's neurons, developed jointly by Griffith's School of Information Communication Technology (ICT) and its Eskitis Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology (Australia).

"Scientists and clinicians will be able to superimpose multiple data sets in three dimensions using automated techniques and then conduct detailed analysis of the data in a far improved way from the two dimensional microscopy that is currently available," said Adrian Meedeniya, according to a Griffith's statement.

"One of the main motivations for establishing this collaboration with the School of School of Information Communication Technology (ICT) was to create the technology to efficiently deal with these huge data sets," said Meedeniya, manager of Griffith's Imaging and Image Analysis Facility.

"We will be able to use this technology to rapidly increase our understanding of the way neuro-degenerative disorders affect nerve cell function in the brain," added Meedeniya.

Microscopy and image acquisition technology has undergone a recent revolution, with modern microscopes generating huge multi-dimensional data sets that can easily fill an entire hard drive.

Manually analysing these data-sets is incredibly time consuming and prone to human error and bias.