And, this changes over time,

Every person’s brain has its own unique ‘fingerprint.’

This is according to a new study, which used an imaging technique known as diffusion MRI to map the brain’s structural connections.

While this uniqueness has long been suspected, the researchers have now shown that these distinct patterns can be used to identify a person with nearly perfect accuracy, and can provide insight on the ways disease, the environment, and other factors affect the brain.

The team led by Carnegie Mellon University measured the local connectomes of 699 brains from five data sets. This revealed that every person’s brain has its own unique ‘fingerprint’

WHAT THE STUDY FOUND The researchers found that the brain's local connectomes act as a unique 'fingerprint.' These are the point-by-point connections along all of the white matter pathways. The researchers also discovered that this uniqueness even largely applies to identical twins. The scans revealed they only share roughly 12 percent of structural connectivity patterns. And, this ‘fingerprint’ changes over time, at an average rate of 13 percent every 100 days. Advertisement

The team led by Carnegie Mellon University and funded by the US Army measured the local connectomes of 699 brains from five data sets.

These are the point-by-point connections along all of the white matter pathways, rather than the connections between the different regions.

The researchers then used the data from the diffusion MRI and reconstructed it to calculate the distribution of water diffusion along the cerebral white matter’s fibers.

This revealed that these features act as unique ‘fingerprints’ for each person.

The team ran more than 17,000 identification tests, and found that they could determine if two local connectomes came from the same person or not nearly 100 percent of the time.

‘The most exciting part is that we can apply this new method to existing data and reveal new information that is already sitting there unexplored,’ said first author Fang-Cheng (Frank) Yeh, an assistant professor of neurological surgery at the University of Pittsburgh, who completed the research as a postdoctoral fellow at CMU.

‘The higher specificity allows us to reliably study how genetic and environmental factors shape the human brain over time, thereby opening a gate to understand how the human brain functions or dysfunctions.’

The researchers also discovered that this uniqueness even applies to identical twins.

The team ran more than 17,000 identification tests, and found that they could determine if two local connectomes came from the same person or not nearly 100 percent of the time. Differences are indicated on a scale of 0 (blue) to 2 (red), with yellow in the middle

The scans revealed they only share roughly 12 percent of structural connectivity patterns.

And, this ‘fingerprint’ changes over time, at an average rate of 13 percent every 100 days.

‘This confirms something that we’ve always assumed in neuroscience – that connectivity patterns in your brain are unique to you,’ said CMU’s Timothy Verstynen, assistant professor of psychology.

‘This means that many of your life experiences are somehow reflected in the connectivity of your brain.