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Placenta Profile
Researcher's in Charge
Michelle Desforges, Carolyn Jones, Igor Chernyavsky, Rohan Lewis, Win Tun, Michele Darrow, Mark Basham
Classifications
310
Thoughts on Project
I was pretty interested in this project. One thing I did notice was that a lot of the images that they had provided seemed to be a little blurry so it would take some more time to correctly identify where the mitochondria were. I did spend a lot of time sending these images over to the researchers or into the discussion to clarify and not send in wrong information. I also think that instead of just the mitochondria, if they asked us to locate other structures as well such as the nucleus, for example, it would give them more accurate data only because there were other structures that were more accurate. In these images, a lot of the time, a circular structure on its own doesn't mean it's always the mitochondria and especially if it's blurry, its very hard to tell specifically. I think for that reason, some people may not feel like this project was worth it but for me, since I got to talk to the researchers a lot more, that was beneficial in other aspects such as being able to set up a zoom call with them!
Throughout the project, the main purpose was to help researchers understand mitochondrial dynamics in the placenta to train computers to analyze new data even faster in the future! Serial block face scanning electron microscopy is used to see placenta profiles. Usually, these profiles are donated by women to research after they have their babies. The women who donated their placentas had normal pregnancies as well as pregnancy complications so through this placenta profiles project, in the future with enough classifications, researchers will be able to identify the "correct" structure of the placenta as well as the consistent area of the mitochondria and what changes in this location tends to lead to defects. With the help of volunteers, there can also be new technology that can look for these complications earlier on with more efficiency as well. Volunteers are tasked with looking for the mitochondria in the placenta and place a mark next to it. If there are multiple which are seen in the image place a mark next to all of them.
