Hello community!

Allen Institute for Brain Science scientist ?Alexh? compiled some thoughts on our recent puzzle, and we wanted to share them with you.

“Late last week, I did a comparison between the latest cell and the gold standard. Overall, I was very encouraged by the result. For the dendrites particularly, there was good agreement between traces.

Almost every segment of dendrite was represented in the consensus, and I even found a place where tracers captured a dendritic branch that we missed in the gold standard (A)! There were also places where the community mistakenly extended a branch (B), or created a surprisingly plausible looking structure out of noise (C). Additionally, there are very short segments (D) that are also false positives. The false positives shown at B, C and D, are all a product of artifactual signal near the surface of the slice. We have learned it is common that the first few planes near the surface of the tissue will have a lot of junk that looks like signal so we are extra discerning when tracing in that zone.”

Good work, everyone! We can?t wait to see what you accomplish next!