We haven't officially announced all the results of our Stall Catchers' Validation study yet, but guess what - they look great, and we are already getting "what's next" questions in the forum! (Thank you for asking!)
The short answer is: Stall Catchers will only gain speed now that we've shown that the Crowd is as good as experts (or better) at catching stalls!
So if you're a stall catcher, please keep searching that brain for blocked blood vessels. And if you're not one yet, well, there's no time like the present:
Citizen Science is still relatively new and there remains skepticism in the scientific community about whether members of the greater public can provide data analysis as good as that of scientists in the lab. Passing the evaluation test means we demonstrated that crowd-based analysis is sufficiently accurate to replace the lab-based analysis. In other words, we have now scientifically validated the use of Stall Catchers as a reliable and accurate way to analyze the Alzheimer's data. Indeed, the crowd-based analysis was so good that in a few cases it revealed errors in the original lab-based data to which it was being compared!
In practice this means we can move forward confidently in analyzing Alzheimer's research data without any expert intervention. Of course experts may spot check the data from time to time to make sure we are on track, but we have answered the basic question of "can Stall Catchers replace laboratory analysis" with a resounding YES! Now we are focused on two goals - building our community and making more efficient use of each annotation. We have lots of ideas for this and you will see some of these show up as new game and social features as well as ways to track your own research contributions and our progress toward a treatment target.
Regarding a second game, we are indeed developing a vessel tracing activity that will complement the Stall Catchers analysis. For this, we are pushing the envelope to see how much of the analysis we can get the computers to do first, so that we can make the best use of everyone's precious time. And sometimes getting a machine to do what you want is like trying to get a cat to jump into a bathtub. So this will be one of our key challenges in 2017.
For now, Stall Catchers is only going to pick up steam, so please stick with us. We have adventures ahead to help us on our mission to finally thwart this disease.
Best New Year wishes,
Pietro
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.hcinst.org/whats-next/