Platform

  • Search
  • Seminars
  • Conferences
  • Jobs

Resources

  • Submit Content
  • About Us

© 2025 World Wide

Open knowledge for all • Started with World Wide Neuro • A 501(c)(3) Non-Profit Organization

Analytics consent required

World Wide relies on analytics signals to operate securely and keep research services available. Accept to continue, or leave the site.

Review the Privacy Policy for details about analytics processing.

World Wide
SeminarsConferencesWorkshopsCoursesJobsMapsFeedLibrary
Back to SeminarsBack
SeminarPast EventNeuroscience

A journey through connectomics: from manual tracing to the first fully automated basal ganglia connectomes

Joergen Kornfeld

Dr

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Schedule
Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Showing your local timezone

Schedule

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

5:00 PM Europe/Berlin

Host: Ad hoc

Access Seminar

Meeting Password

757285

Use this password when joining the live session

Event Information

Domain

Neuroscience

Original Event

View source

Host

Ad hoc

Duration

70 minutes

Abstract

The "mind of the worm", the first electron microscopy-based connectome of C. elegans, was an early sign of where connectomics is headed, followed by a long time of little progress in a field held back by the immense manual effort required for data acquisition and analysis. This changed over the last few years with several technological breakthroughs, which allowed increases in data set sizes by several orders of magnitude. Brain tissue can now be imaged in 3D up to a millimeter in size at nanometer resolution, revealing tissue features from synapses to the mitochondria of all contained cells. These breakthroughs in acquisition technology were paralleled by a revolution in deep-learning segmentation techniques, that equally reduced manual analysis times by several orders of magnitude, to the point where fully automated reconstructions are becoming useful. Taken together, this gives neuroscientists now access to the first wiring diagrams of thousands of automatically reconstructed neurons connected by millions of synapses, just one line of program code away. In this talk, I will cover these developments by describing the past few years' technological breakthroughs and discuss remaining challenges. Finally, I will show the potential of automated connectomics for neuroscience by demonstrating how hypotheses in reinforcement learning can now be tackled through virtual experiments in synaptic wiring diagrams of the songbird basal ganglia.

Topics

3D imagingC elegansautomated reconstructionsbasal gangliabird-songconnectomicsdata acquisitiondeep-learning segmentationelectron microscopymachine learningreinforcement learningsynaptic wiring

About the Speaker

Joergen Kornfeld

Dr

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Contact & Resources

Personal Website

www.bioengineering.tum.de/en/events/details/vortrag-a-journey-through-connectomics-from-manual-tracing-to-the-first-fully-automated-basal-ganglia-connectomes-von-joergen-kornfeld

@jmrko

Follow on Twitter/X

twitter.com/jmrko

Related Seminars

Seminar60%

Knight ADRC Seminar

neuro

Jan 20, 2025
Washington University in St. Louis, Neurology
Seminar60%

TBD

neuro

Jan 20, 2025
King's College London
Seminar60%

Guiding Visual Attention in Dynamic Scenes

neuro

Jan 20, 2025
Haifa U
January 2026
Full calendar →