🔬 Open Science · Big Data Neuroscience

Open Connectome
Project

Providing public access to high-resolution neuroanatomical data and scalable tools to map the neural circuits of the brain — together.

Electron Microscopy 200+ TB Public Data RESTful APIs Brain Mapping Open Source
Explore Data → Learn More
200+
Terabytes of Data
20 TV
Mouse Visual Cortex
20+
Public Datasets
5+
Imaging Modalities
Our Mission

Enabling Big-Data Neuroscience

We work together with neuro experimentalists to discover fundamental principles governing the relationship between mind and brain — through open-source, data-driven tools that run at scale.

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High-Throughput Imaging

Access multi-teravoxel brain imaging datasets captured via electron microscopy, CLARITY, array tomography, two-photon calcium imaging, and fMRI.

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Scalable Infrastructure

A distributed database cluster designed for spatial analysis and annotation of high-throughput data. All interfaces are RESTful web services for maximum scalability.

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Open Access

All datasets and services are publicly available. Our goal is to bring world-class scientific data to anyone with internet access — no barriers, no paywalls.

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Neural Circuit Mapping

Reconstructing the structure and connectivity of the brain using computer vision pipelines on supercomputers, co-registered in scalable databases.

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Community-Driven

"Alg-sourcing" — automated computer vision algorithms contributed by the community to reconstruct neural circuits collaboratively at scale.

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Data-Intensive Science

Understanding the mechanisms for computation in the human brain and the neurological basis of complex disorders like autism, ADHD, and Alzheimer's.

About the Project

From Cosmos to Connectomes

The Open Connectome Project (OCP) is a Johns Hopkins University initiative that provides access to high-resolution neuroanatomical images that can be used to explore connectomes. We provide programmatic access to this data for human and machine annotation, with a long-term goal of reconstructing the neural circuits comprising an entire brain.

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The Human Connectome
Mapping the 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses that comprise the human brain — one dataset at a time.
Featured Datasets

Publicly Available Brain Data

All data hosted on the AWS Open NeuroData Registry

Kasthuri et al. 2015 — Mouse cortex EM
Bock et al. 2011 — Mouse visual cortex
Weiler et al. 2014 — Array tomography
Bloss et al. 2016 — Hippocampal circuits
Lee et al. 2016 — Synaptic connectivity
Collman et al. 2015 — Multi-channel data
Harris et al. 2015 — Dendritic spines
Randlett et al. 2015 — Zebrafish brain
View All Datasets →
Recent Work

Key Publications

  • Vogelstein et al. A Community-Developed Open-Source Computational Ecosystem for Big Neuro Data. Nature Methods, (11)15:846–847, 2018.

    Nature Methods · 2018

  • Burns, Vogelstein, Szalay. From cosmos to connectomes: The evolution of data-intensive science. Neuron, (6)83:1249–1252, 2014.

    Neuron · 2014

  • Burns et al. The Open Connectome Project Data Cluster: Scalable Analysis and Vision for High-Throughput Neuroscience. ACM SSDBM, 2013.

    ACM SSDBM · 2013
All Publications →