#CrushALZ Week 2 wrap up!

by Egle (seplute)

The #CrushALZ competition on the Stall Catchers citizen science game has completed it's second week on April 20th. Find a summary of all we have achieved during the 14 days of the competition below. If you need a reminder of Week One results, check back here.

The competition to #CrushALZ will run for 14 more days from today. We need your support! Join StallCatchers.com today.

Catchers in the game are working on analysing a real dataset that will advance Alzheimer's research. All about it here.

Weekly achievements

  • We have reached the 100 thousand vessel milestone: a total of 111 997 vessels were analysed by the end of Week 2!

  • Up to 8.6 weeks worth of work in the lab: currently, we need at least 20 answers from the community to get a confident crowd answer, and not all analysed vessels belong to the "real" research dataset - some are used for training. Therefore, since we have analysed 59 895 "real" vessels of the current research dataset, and combining all the answers, we achieved up to 8.6 weeks worth of work in the lab, which means we are analysing the data several times faster than the researchers could do alone.

  • Gaining new teams: 4 new teams have joined Stall Catchers during Week 2, ensuring that now as many 22 teams are working to #CrushALZ.

  • Set to finish the research dataset in 84 days: during the first two weeks of #CrushALZ we have been annotating 4278 vessels per day, on average. If we keep at this speed we could finish the dataset in 84 days. That means we might not finish by the end of the competition, but we will certainly get it done several times faster than it could be done in the lab.



Notice a dip in daily annotations on Easter Day... 🙃 but the catchers quickly bounced back after & even got to the all time high for real vessels!

  • All time high reached for real daily vessels: record amounts of "real" vessels (those from the current research dataset) were annotated during the Days 12 to 14! This means our more experienced players (who tend to receive more real vessels to annotate) have been hard at work, and new players are gaining experience as well. This also means that we are progressing towards our research goal at a faster speed!

Weekly leaders

We had a complete reshuffling of the leaderboards on Week 2, with Middle School STEM - a team of middle school students and staff, and the largest Stall Catchers team of all time - won the weekly winner title from CitSciGamers. Meanwhile, previous weekly outsiders, Stall Destroyers, managed to jump to 3rd place!

EyesOnALZ and Alzheimer's Research UK have managed to keep their high places in the weekly leaderboard, while Cornell Univ, our biomedical experts, and BrightFocus Foundation - previous leaders, fell to the bottom, making place for another two community teams: STALLS WILL NOT PASS and KMS Genius Hour.

It is fantastic to see community teams joining, learning, and rising to the very top of the leaderboards!

Two weeks to go! Let's keep crushing Alzheimer's with all we have - invite everyone to Stall Catchers!