2.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course will introduce the emerging field of connectomics, and give students the opportunity to contribute directly to ongoing research efforts within the computer science department. This field enables novel brain circuit analysis at the ultrastructure level (i.e., individual synapses and neurons) and promises insight into areas such as biofidelic algorithms and the validation of the cortical column hypothesis first proposed at JHU by Vernon Mountcastle in the 1960s. We will begin by broadly surveying the field of brain mapping across different scales, and more deeply examine research in ultrastructure electron microscopy reconstruction efforts. Students will learn about scalable algorithms and approaches to extract graphs from large image volumes (O(100 TB+)), and the importance of computer science in addressing modern neuroscience challenges. Programming experience in MATLAB, Python or R is helpful but not required.