News From the Admin Team

Our Admin Team has been quite stretched for a while as our seasoned catchers can appreciate. They have been working hard to implement a new multi-functional platform to accommodate additional future projects and enhancements for Stall Catchers while tending to necessary workshops and seeking support for on-going activities and needed resources.

Three days ago, Pietro responded to an inquiry from CatchME! in the chat box; providing some very exciting information. Since information in the chat soon loses visibility, the essence of Pietro’s update follows so that others have the opportunity to see it. This might become a regular feature in the forum. Meanwhile, here’s the news from Pietro:

Exciting news! We are working with Boston University to see if we can use Stall Catchers to examine capillary stalling not only in Alzheimer’s patients, but also in stroke patients! We hope to have some pilot data to share with you soon. Check for more details soon in the blog at blog.hcinst.org. We will, of course, continue to analyze data from the Schaffer-Nishimura Lab to accelerate the Alzheimer’s research (in case there was any doubt).

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In case you missed it in the chat box, four days ago Pietro and company were at the Schaffer-Nishimura lab “meeting with a new cadre of undergraduate researchers who are preparing new data for Stall Catchers.” They plan to post more info on this in the blog “soon,” so be sure to check there now and then for updates.

OK, I’ve been informed that after a brief outage, the Forum has been updated and came back online August 10th.

Our fearless leader, Pietro, discovered that while Blog posts were supposed to be visible in the Forum, they had previously gone into a “hidden section,” which was why none of us could see them there (here).

So, from now on, anyone visiting this Forum will also be able to see the latest Blog postings as well. Just look for the big green “B.” (Except it’s a circle, not a square. Doin’ the best I can. :roll_eyes:)

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Why we were (twice) stuck at 99.1% on the blue verification status bar. (My non-expert summary of Pietro’s explanation below was posted in the chat box yesterday.)

From Pietro: “It turns out that one of the image stacks from the lab never resulted in generated movies even though 620 ghost records were added to the database. So Stall Catchers thought there were 620 movies that nobody annotated (they all had load errors).”

Pietro said that he hid those movies to correct the progress bar error and will see about reprocessing the image stack if warranted.

Update on Pilot Data for Stroke Patients

Pietro reports that after several manipulations we have our first pilot dataset with stroke data from Boston University ready to try on Stall Catchers. Expect to see a blog post about it soon. This data set will be a bit different, but we catchers should adapt OK. Pietro will explain in the blog post, but I understand the resolution is only about a fourth what we’re used to, and the frame rate had to be slowed to be the same as our regular movies (so not as smooth). But the main difference is that the vessels are all flattened on top of each other (so no change in depth) which might help in some ways, and maybe confuse in others.

Look for the blog update soon.