Crowd-Powered Microvascular Modeling

Cornell University researchers have made breakthrough discoveries in understanding the role of brain blood flow in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but more evidence is needed to establish whether freeing stalled capillaries might results in a possible treatment approach. The problem is that it takes an entire year to analyze the data needed to answer each research question, and progress to date has been very slow. “Stall Catchers” is a citizen science research project developed by the Human Computation Institute in collaboration with Cornell investigators Chris Schaffer and Nozomi Nishimura aimed at speeding up Cornell’s data analysis by turning it into an online game that anyone can play. Our Phase I goal is to see whether thousands of public participants can analyze the research data just as accurately as lab experts, but by working together, do it much faster. In Phase II, we will apply the validated crowd engine to new experimental data to see if we can reduce the time to a treatment target from decades to just a few years. This is the first citizen science project supporting Alzheimer’s disease (AD) research. To learn more about EyesOnAlz, visit www.eyesonalz.com.