Initial work has focused on reconstruction of neuronal wiring diagrams from 3D electron microscopy images of neural tissue. In this approach, the brain is imaged at high resolution (e.g., 8x8x8 nanometers) with an electron microscope, and then several image analysis problems need to be solved in order to generate the wiring diagram of the portion of the brain that was imaged: aligning consecutive 2D image slices into a coherent 3D volume, tracing wires to their parent cell body, and detecting and characterizing synapses. Due to the vast amounts of data involved -- a single cubic millimeter of tissue may generate a thousand trillion pixels of image data -- computational methods that automate these tasks are an urgent necessity.
Our goal is to leverage Google expertise and resources to advance understanding of the structure and function of the brain.