The Eyewire II project has just received a $950,000 Transformational Team Science Award

Hertie AI is part of the international Eyewire II project, which has just received a $950,000 Transformational Team Science Award from the foundation Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB). The Hertie AI contribution to the consortium is led by our director Philipp Berens, together with postdocs Simone Ebert, Jan Lause, and Jonathan Oesterle.

Eyewire II aims to build the first complete wiring diagram of the mouse retina, reconstructing cell types and synapses, and linking them to their functional responses. To do this, the consortium combines two-photon calcium imaging of light-driven activity with volumetric 3D electron microscopy, and then applies state-of-the-art machine learning tools to reconstruct and annotate the circuit. The result will be open source and made accessible to the entire community. This will have the potential to transform how we study vision in health and disease. For example, the data will allow researchers to develop simulations that make it possible to study how retinal circuits change in conditions such as glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and macular degeneration.

At the Hertie Institute for AI in Brain Health we are developing machine learning methods that turn large-scale neuroscience data into clinical insight. Eyewire II sits right at that intersection: a large-scale dataset of the mapped retina, requiring new computational methods, to ultimately serve the patients whose sight depends on understanding the retina at this level of detail.