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-kind: the 3D interactive playground showcases neurons in a mouse’s retina in exquisite detail, down to every bend and turn in a cell’s sinuous branches.
Unlike previous “brain atlases,” EyeWire Museum doesn’t just chart the physical structure of its neurons. Ripe for exploration are data about how individual neurons spring to action. Like humans, each neuron has its own character: in the light of stimuli, some may choose to respond quickly but soon shut off; others may activate in a slow burn. The new museum contains these functional data for exploration. Linking physical structure to functional data is extremely rare. 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 neuroscience community offers a detailed, expansive resource that could help collaborations in projects such as retinal prosthetics. As the light sensor and first stage of visual processing in the brain, the retina holds the key to how our brains process images with such ease. Unveiling their secrets could even help machine vision scientists construct AI systems that mimic nature’s solution to vision.
To read more, click here.