A Chinese team's brain imaging device has come under question from developers of a U.S. device who say it's a near duplicate of theirs, LiveScience has learned. An article on the Chinese device was published in Science.

According to the report online in Science Nov. 4th, the Chinese imaging device used a diamond knife to shave ribbons off a centimeter-size mouse brain and imaged the slices during the process, which allowed the Chinese team to create a 3-D map of the brain that revealed details as small as the axons and dendrites — the circuitry that transmits signals between brain cells — as a step in the race to map the connections in the brain.

LiveScience contacted Yoonsuck Choe, director of the Brain Networks Laboratory at Texas A&M University, for comment the Chinese device the day the paper was published, and their inquiry immediately set off alarms.