Our Goal
Our goal is to work together with neuro experimentalists to discover fundamental principles governing the relationship between mind and brain, via building and deploying open source data-driven tools that run at scale.
The Open Connectome Project (OCP) provides access to high-resolution neuroanatomical images that can be used to explore connectomes. We also 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.
This project aims to bring the most state-of-the-art scientific data in the world to the hands of anybody with internet access, so collectively, we can begin to unravel connectomes.
Scalable Infrastructure
Built for petabyte-scale neuroscience data
Distributed Database Cluster
Data distributed to cluster nodes by partitioning a spatial index. Reads go to parallel disk arrays; writes to solid-state storage to maximize throughput and avoid I/O interference.
RESTful Web Services
All programming interfaces are RESTful web services — simple, stateless, and scalable. Supports cutout queries, annotation projects, and metadata retrieval.
Cloud-Native Architecture
Inherits from NoSQL scale-out and data-intensive computing architectures. All data now hosted on the AWS Open NeuroData Registry for maximum accessibility.
Computer Vision Pipelines
Parallel execution of computer vision algorithms on high-performance compute clusters reconstructs brain structures and connectivity maps stored in co-registered databases.
3D Spatial Queries
Query brain volumes by spatial coordinates, annotation type, metadata fields, and more. Support for equality, range, and custom key-value queries.
Multiple Modalities
3D electron microscopy image stacks, time-series data, multi-channel array tomography, calcium imaging, and fMRI — all unified under a single query interface.
Vision for the Future
Neuroscience is poised at the edge of a revolution of discovery based on recent advances in high-throughput imaging. Data-intensive science will help us understand the mechanisms for computation in the human brain and provide the foundation for research into the neurological basis of complex disorders such as autism and ADHD.
The OCP system was designed primarily for workloads that build connectomes — neural connectivity maps of the brain — using the parallel execution of computer vision algorithms on high-performance compute clusters. These services and open-science data sets are publicly available.