AI-generated synthetic neurons speed up brain mapping

Using computers to create full wiring maps of complex brains is enabling a new era of neuroscience. A recently released map of the complete male fruit fly brain and central nervous system provides a foundational resource for studying how the brain responds to stimuli and controls the body.But reconstructing the entire brains of mammals, and certainly of humans, remains far out of reach. The fruit fly brain map, with 166,000 neurons, represents years of work by AI-enabled computers and human experts. A complete mouse brain is a thousand times larger, and a human brain is a thousand times larger than that.Google Research is developing AI techniques to tackle larger brain mapping projects by speeding up the identification, classification, and visualization of neurons. With our partners, we’ve also mapped fragments of a zebra finch brain, a whole larval zebrafish brain, and a small fragment of the human brain, and we recently launched an effort to map a small section of mouse brain. Our new paper “MoGen: Detailed neuronal morphology generation via point cloud flow matching”, to be presented at ICLR 2026, uses synthetic neural shapes to improve AI reconstruction models.Enhancing the training data with synthetic examples from the Neuronal Morphology Generation model, or MoGen, delivers a 4.4% reduction in reconstruction errors and suggests directions for further improvements. While a 4.4% error improvement might sound modest, at the large scale of a complete mouse brain, this translates to 157 person-years of manual proofreading saved.This adds to the Google Research Connectomics team’s growing list of foundational tools to advance modern neuroscience, developed over more than a decade of collaborative brain science research.

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