Automatic discovery of cell types and microcircuitry from neural connectomics
This addresses the challenge of analyzing massive connectomics datasets to uncover biological and computational structure, which is crucial for understanding neural function, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing analysis methods.
The authors tackled the problem of automatically discovering neuron types and microcircuitry from neural connectomics data by developing a nonparametric Bayesian technique that integrates connectivity, cell body location, and synapse distribution. They demonstrated that this approach recovers known neuron types in the retina, enables better connectivity predictions than simpler algorithms, and reveals structure in C. elegans and a microprocessor.
Neural connectomics has begun producing massive amounts of data, necessitating new analysis methods to discover the biological and computational structure. It has long been assumed that discovering neuron types and their relation to microcircuitry is crucial to understanding neural function. Here we developed a nonparametric Bayesian technique that identifies neuron types and microcircuitry patterns in connectomics data. It combines the information traditionally used by biologists, including connectivity, cell body location and the spatial distribution of synapses, in a principled and probabilistically-coherent manner. We show that the approach recovers known neuron types in the retina and enables predictions of connectivity, better than simpler algorithms. It also can reveal interesting structure in the nervous system of C. elegans, and automatically discovers the structure of a microprocessor. Our approach extracts structural meaning from connectomics, enabling new approaches of automatically deriving anatomical insights from these emerging datasets.