Progress and remaining challenges in high-throughput volume electron microscopy

Recent advances in the effectiveness of the automatic extraction of neural circuits from volume electron microscopy data have made us more optimistic that the goal of reconstructing the nervous system of an entire adult mammal (or bird) brain can be achieved in the next decade. The progress on the data analysis side based mostly on variants of convolutional neural networks has been particularly impressive, but improvements in the quality and spatial extent of published VEM datasets are substantial. Methodologically, the combination of hot-knife sample partitioning and ion milling stands out as a conceptual advance while the multi-beam scanning electron microscope promises to remove the data acquisition bottleneck.