Center for Multimodal Neuroimaging

Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing in Neuroscience: Embracing web technology for more open and collaborative science

August 2017

Despite rapid advances in automation and machine learning there remain many tasks in biomedical science that require intensive manual work from domain experts. New web technologies have made it possible to distribute these tasks across large numbers of volunteers throughout the world. Early successes with protein folding have spurred additional projects in neuron labelling and tracing. More recently the brain imaging community has begun to explore crowdsourcing for anatomical segmentation and labelling. Dr. Kesavan discussed her recent work building these tools as well as a new collaborative project with the NIMH Data Science and Sharing Team. Dr. Keshavan's tools include: MindBoggle, MindControl, and Medulina.