
Human Connectome Project - jimsojim
http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/
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apl
The key bottleneck with all connectome projects is still reconstruction.
There's on the order of a hundred billion neurones in the human brain; they're
connected via 1,000-10,000 times the number of synapses. Current machine
learning approaches are decent, but still require massive amounts of proof-
reading.

Circuit neuroscience in _Drosophila_ or the mammalian retina suggests neurones
and synapses are indeed the level of detail we'll need in order to gain
insight into computational mechanisms. So we're a long, long way off -- don't
be too impressed by this particular dataset (which is _insanely_ coarse!).

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SapphireSun
Hey if you guys want to help out with the proof reading effort, we've got a
cool dataset that has a resolution of 16.5 nm x 16.5 nm x 23 nm at
[http://eyewire.org](http://eyewire.org) ^_^

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fyrabanks
This project and particular site have been around, largely unchanged, for many
years.

The WU-Minn side of the project is seemingly more active, and their dataset is
much, much easier to obtain:
[http://humanconnectome.org/data/](http://humanconnectome.org/data/). Their
scripts for processing the data are up on github at
[https://github.com/Washington-
University/Pipelines](https://github.com/Washington-University/Pipelines).

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nulltype
What level of detail is available from this data?

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josephdviviano
The resolution is some of the best in the business, so to speak, but the
biological interpretation of all MRI-derived metrics are still hotly debated.
So the true level is detail is sort of dependent on something we don't know
yet.

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nulltype
Hmm, is there something like this where they just slice a brain directly
rather than using low resolution MRIs?

Edit: oh here's one [http://io9.com/see-the-first-ultra-high-
resolution-3d-scan-o...](http://io9.com/see-the-first-ultra-high-
resolution-3d-scan-of-the-ent-514395280)

~~~
josephdviviano
Yes, but this does not include any functional data, arguably a huge
contribution of the HCP project. The history of neuroscience has taught us
that you can only look so far by looking at anatomy alone!

