The Sano Center Makes Advancements in Neuroimaging Through Quantum Computing

The Sano Center for Computational Medicine, based in Kraków, Poland, is making headlines for their forthcoming DWAVE platform and their use of quantum computing for advancements in neuroimaging, which will ultimately help with their work on brain disease and injuries. Through research by Dr. Alessandro Crimi (head of the Sano research unit) along with Marcin Wierzbinski (University of Warsaw) and Joan Falco-Roget (Sano Center for Computational Personalised Medicine), they determined, through promising preliminary results, that quantum computing may give better results when computing brain connectomes (brain wiring diagram) than current mapping technology.

What is Neuroimaging and Quantum Computing

The Sano Center for Computational Medicine is a research group focused on different aspects of neuroimaging, from microscopy to magnetic resonance imaging (commonly known as an MRI). Neuroimaging is the process of producing images of the structure or activity of the brain or other part of the nervous system. Neuroimaging uses techniques such as magnetic resonance to aide scientists in confirming a diagnosis, among other uses.

Quantum computing uses the collective properties of quantum states, such as superposition, interference, and entanglement, to perform calculations.

To quote their paper, “Network neuroscience is an emerging discipline that tries to examine brain organizing principles using network science tools. It was made possible by the intersection of networks science and neuroscience . This allows the merging of two worlds which have shown tremendous advancements in recent years. The first world is given by complex system studies through graph analysis, the second is given by neuroimaging, which permits modeling of brain structure and function even representing relevant information as graph . Community (also called cluster or module) detection is an explored yet not solved task in many fields using graph representations.”

The Sano Center

The Sano Center research unit, headed by Dr. Alessandro Crimi, is involved in other medical imaging projects as well as translation of research into startups and other forms of inclusion in society. While the DWAVE platform is not yet on the market, the Sano Center is working to launch some startups related to neuroimaging in the future. They Sano Center has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the International Research Agendas Programme of the Foundation for Polish Science.

Learn more about the Brain and More Lab, the neuroimaging research group at Sano by visiting their website here: https://bam.sano.science.

To learn more about their research and work, read Dr. Crimi’s research paper here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.21.521454v1.full.pdf