[Computational Biology Seminar Series] High-throughput reconstruction of brain circuits

Date: October 5, 2007

Title: High-throughput reconstruction of brain circuits: how machine vision will revolutionize neuroscience

Speaker: Dmitri B. Chklovskii

Abstract:
How does electrical activity in neuronal circuits give rise to intelligent behavior? We believe that this question is impossible to answer without a comprehensive description of neurons and synaptic connections between them. Absence of such a description, often called a wiring diagram, has been holding back the development of neuroscience. We believe that recent technological advances in high-resolution imaging and machine vision will make possible the reconstruction of whole wiring diagrams of simpler organisms or significant parts of more complex systems, such as the mammalian neocortex. Such reconstructions promise to revolutionize neuroscience just like human genome sequencing revolutionized molecular biology.