Eyewire researchers and gamers discover six new neuron types

With the help of a quarter-million video game players, Princeton researchers have created and shared detailed maps of more than 1,000 neurons — and they’re just getting started.

“Working with Eyewirers around the world, we’ve made a digital museum that shows off the intricate beauty of the retina’s neural circuits,” said Sebastian Seung, the Evnin Professor in Neuroscience and a professor of computer science and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI). The related paper appears today in the journal Cell.

Seung is unveiling the Eyewire Museum, an interactive archive of neurons available to the general public and neuroscientists around the world, including the hundreds of researchers involved in the federal Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative.

“This interactive viewer is a huge asset for these larger collaborations, especially among people who are not physically in the same lab,” said Amy Robinson Sterling, a crowdsourcing specialist with PNI and the executive director of Eyewire, the online gaming platform for the citizen scientists who have created this data set.

“This museum is something like a brain atlas,” said Alexander Bae, a graduate student in electrical engineering and one of four co-first authors on the paper. “Previous brain atlases didn’t have a function where you could visualize by individual cell, or a subset of cells, and interact with them. Another novelty: Not only do we have the morphology of each cell, but we also have the functional data, too.”


These six new types of neurons were first mapped by gamers playing Eyewire, a project of Princeton’s Seung Lab, and they are now available to explore in the new interactive cell visualizer at museum.eyewire.org.

Read the full article by Liz Fuller-Wright on princeton.edu
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/05/17/princeton-researchers-crowdsource-brain-mapping-gamers-discover-six-new-neuron