A Quarter Million Gamers Helped Build This Incredibly Detailed Map of the Brain 5/31/18, 12)51 PM

A Quarter Million Gamers H

Build This Incredibly Detail
the Brain
By Shelly Fan - May 30, 2018

EyeWire, neuroscience’s most audacious experiment, just opened up a digital museum

Constructed with the help of a quarter million gamers, EyeWire Museum is one-of-a-ki
showcases neurons in a mouse’s retina in exquisite detail, down to every bend and tu

Unlike previous “brain atlases,” EyeWire Museum doesn’t just chart the physical struct
exploration are data about how individual neurons spring to action. Like humans, each
light of stimuli, some may choose to respond quickly but soon shut off; others may act

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museum contains these functional data for exploration. Linking physical structure to fu
Making it available at the level of single cells—roughly 400 in total—is even rarer.

The museum isn’t just aesthetically pleasing. Releasing it open-source to the neurosci
expansive resource that could help collaborations in projects such as retinal prostheti
of visual processing in the brain, the retina holds the key to how our brains process im
secrets could even help machine vision scientists construct AI systems that mimic natu

“This interactive viewer is a huge asset for these larger collaborations, especially amo
the same lab,” said Amy Robinson Sterling, the executive director of EyeWire.

It’s a significant contribution, said Dr. Marla Feller at UC Berkeley’s Department of Mol
Neuroscience Institute, who was not involved in the research.

“Establishing a relationship between the structure and function of a neuron is a primar

explained. “By completely reconstructing neighboring neurons of the same type within
now examine their spatial relationships.”

You can check the museum for yourself here. The results were published in the presti
hooray!—credit to the EyeWire players that made it happen.

Citizen Connectomics
When Sebastian Seung left a promising career in theoretical neuroscience in 2005 fo
thought he was crazy.

Although projects that “map the brain” seem commonplace these days, the idea was i
The scale alone is staggering: the human brain contains 80 billion neurons densely pa
football. Untangling the trillions of connections that neurons make is like tracing a sing
size of the Pacific Ocean.

Yet Seung saw the potential in charting the brain’s unexplored connectivity.

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The theoretical physicist-turned-neuroscientist is an early evangelist for connectomics

connections between neurons in an effort to figure out how the brain works. In a popu
theory of “you are your connectome”: every memory, experience, and personality trait
the physical structure of the connections in your brain. Reconstruct the connectome a
able to reconstruct you.

Imaging the brain is a crazy complicated engineering project. First, scientists treat the
melt into mush when it’s extracted. The entire brain is then sliced into wafer-thin sectio
somewhat like a deli meat slicer. Each section is then carefully imaged under powerfu
time, and the resulting images are pieced together in files on the scale of gigabytes p

That’s the easy part.

Even harder work comes after the images are assembled. When Seung began his the
connectomics, he estimated that it would take a single human tracer roughly a million
their branches in a cubic millimeter of human cortex. An entire human brain would req

Obviously he needed some help. His solution? Gamify brain mapping.

EyeWire, the Game

In 2012, when Angry Birds was in its prime, Seung had an inspiration.

“What if,” he wondered, “we could capture even a small fraction of the mental effort th
mapping)? Think of what we could do.”

Although the initial idea was to use deep learning-based AI tools to reconstruct the ne
better at spotting the patterns of neuronal branches and connectors than machines. C
fellow professor at MIT with a background in game design, Seung tried to make a gam
as a first-person shooter. Spoiler: you can’t.

Since its inception, the game has garnered some die-hard fans (and an anime-style int
achievement badges, a scoreboard and swag for competitions. Nevertheless, EyeWire
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“play” in biology class, and the 265,000 plus gamers contributing do it “for science!” r

“The community has really been the driving force behind why Eyewire has been succe
come in, and you’re not alone.“

In the game, each player is given a tiny cube of the retinal tissue, about 4.5 microns w
human hair for a 10-by-10 block of cubes. To ensure accuracy, each cell is reviewed by
results match up, the trace is accepted by the game as being complete. These traces
deep learning algorithm, which learns to better recognize individual neuronal branche

Eventually the goal is to automate the entire process. While a pipe dream just five yea
in biology has been transformative. A recent study used a powerful algorithm to identi
generated images, a task normally relegated to junior neuroscientist trainees. As more
eventually learn to self-map, and such a strategy could be adopted to explore other re

A Whole New (Retinal) World

The biggest surprise in the latest EyeWire Museum release is the discovery of six new
years ago, scientists estimated the number of ganglion cells—the major cell type in the
team found more than 35 types.

“There’s a little sliver of a mouse retina, and almost 10 years later, we’re still learning th

Making sense of the roughly 400 densely packed retinal cells was a challenge. “The p
neurons sparsely sampled from a single individual,” explained Seung and his team.

Here, they found that different cells grow along different physical planes in the retina—
shows how remarkably flat these cells are stretched in space, compared to a neuron i

Unlike previous brain atlases, EyeWire lets its users browse multiple neurons at the sa
reconstruction. This simultaneous display lets scientists visualize overlaps between th
points of connection, explained the authors.

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These may just be among the first discoveries as scientists around the globe experime

Neuroscientists are still in the early stages of assembling the brain’s “parts list,” explai
adding, “If you know what parts make up the machine you’re trying to break apart, you
works.”

Image Credit: Alex Norton, Eyewire

Shelly Xuelai Fan is a neuroscientist at the University of Californ

S H E L LY FA N
make old brains young again. In addition to research, she's also
obsession with biotech, AI and all things neuro. She spends her
lost in the woods.

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