First, Congratulations to the winners the Flywire Feedback Data Challenge! Find a recording of the Award Lecture at took place at Princeton University on Oct 28, 2024, here.
Up next: cell identification in The BANC.
Jump the the VNC Challenge Page in Codex
Our goal in this challenge is to determine whether connectivity information alone is sufficient to align connectomes from two distinct datasets. Specifically, we examine the ventral nerve cords (VNCs) of male and female Drosophila, each comprising approximately 19,000 neurons. Successfully aligning these connectomes can reveal important insights into the similarities and differences between, for example, the male and female motor circuits.
We frame the alignment task as an approximate graph matching problem between two graphs that represent the respective connectomes.
Input and objective
You are given two weighted directed graphs GM = (VM, EM) and GF = (VF, EF), where:
- nodes V represent individual neurons
- edges E represent synaptic connections, with edge weights indicating the number of synapses between connected neurons
VM and VF are of same size, and your task is to produce a 1:1 mapping f:VM → VF with the objective of aligning the connectivity between the two graph as closely as possible.
Specifically, the mapping alignment score is defined as Σ min(EM(x, y), EF(f(x), f(y))), where summation is over all pairs of nodes x, y in VM (if an edge is not specified in the graph’s edge list, assume the edge weight is 0).
Your goal is to find a mapping f that maximizes the alignment score.
For more information, visit the VNC Challenge page in Codex.
