Brain Prints, Like Fingerprints, Can Help Identify People

STATES CHRONICLE – Due to recent experiments, scientists have discovered that brain prints, like fingerprints, can help identify people. The findings of the current study will be used to assess people’s tendency to develop brain-related diseases, such as, Alzheimer’s disease or schizophrenia.

Neuroscientists are aware that people are different, yet, when asked about it, researchers can’t really say what exactly makes individuals different. Sure, individuals have different physical traits and different fingerprints, but they also have the ability to think out of the box, or think differently, and it is this particular mystery that researchers are interested in.

The current study was conducted by researchers at the Washington University and the University of Minnesota. Scientists have used fMRI images, that is, functional connectivity MRI to determine how the activity in one node is synchronized to the rest of the activities. This method has enabled them to create a collection of 268 nodes, which have been later on, compared to the rest of the nodes.

The ‘connectivity profile’ that was created using the aforementioned criteria contained 35,778 connections. The neural connections identified during fMRI scan have then, been compared to connections from other scans to see whether there were any similarities between the two or not.

Researchers were aware that the scans had to be conducted during different neural activities; therefore, participants were evaluated during activity tasks and while at rest. The experiment was reiterated during a second study and the two values were compared.

At the end of the experiment, scientists have noticed that scans that were performed during rest periods enabled the identification of participants in 93 to 94 percent of the cases. Differences were somewhat bigger for activity tasks, but similarities still ranged between 54 and 87 percent of the cases, scientists have explained.

Emily Finn, one of the authors of the current study, has stated that the experiment proves there could be similarities between the brain activities of the same person. These patterns can be used to identify the respective person.

However, identifying people through brain prints is not the main goal of researchers. They think this can be easily achieved by fingerprinting individuals. Researchers will use the current piece of information to identify people who are more likely to develop brain-related diseases.

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