Sometimes scientists toot their own horns and sometimes horns are tooted for them. At the announcement of the winners of the Diadem challenge at Janelia Farm Research Campus on 1 September, judges sounded four colorful vuvuzelas as each team accepted their commendation.
Researchers participating in the challenge, which began 29 August, generated algorithms that would create a detailed map of the branching axons and dendrites of a neuron, a process which takes human researchers weeks or months. In the end, none of the five teams reached the benchmark goal of a 20 times improvement in speed and the judges chose to divvy up the $75,000 prize money as follows:
$25,000 to Badrinath Roysam of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York and his team
$25,000 to Armen Stepanyants of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts and his team
$15,000 to Gene Myers of the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Virginia and his team
$10,000 to German Gonzalez of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland and his team
The final team, led by Deniz Erdogmus of Northeastern University, received accolades but no prize money.
Though no one matched the speed benchmark, the top two algorithms were able to trace neurons 10 times faster than a human, an order of magnitude upgrade than was available a week ago. Team leader Badrinath Roysam says that he hopes that the groups will pool their results and work together to achieve further improvements.
The ultimate goal of this research is to produce a map of connections in the human brain, known as a connectome. Such an accomplishment would allow researchers to better understand the workings of the brain, how it changes through time, and the underpinning of neural diseases such as schizophrenia and autism. Achieving such a goal would require a speed boost of not just 20 but 20,000 times the current techniques, says Diadem challenge organizer Giorgio Ascoli of George Mason University in Virginia.
Further reading:
Neuroscience: Making connections
Image: Wikimedia