I taught a fly to do MRI quality assurance for me
Researchers from the FlyWire consortium have achieved a remarkable feat - mapping a complete connectome for the fruit fly! In a huge win for opens science, they’ve released the MaleCNS v1.0 connectome for others to use as well.
Building this scientific achievement, people have decided to use the fly connectome for… more creative uses. As it turns out, you can map images as visual inputs by simulating neuronal activations, and tune activation thresholds on a couple of selected output neurons to make decisions about tasks. We’ve seen Stonkfly - a fly for trading stocks, a fly that can parallel park and yes, even Doomfly for playing Doom.
Our lab performs tons of large-scale quality assurance (QA) on medical images. We’ve created tools like MASI QA for quickly running through tons of scans at a time to notice any anomalies - things like head motion during scans, failures in processing, or incorrect body parts that slipped into datasets. Inspired by what I’ve seen the fly do, I used Claude to prototype The Fly Who Does QA.
How does this work? As with previous works, we simulate inputs to the visual system and simulate neuronal activations. Then, we take the sum of the firing rates of two neurons and treat them as a confidence score. To train the fly, we tune thresholds for the confidence score to classify the images based on a set of training data (here, 150 passing images and 150 failing images). After tuning those thresholds, we can apply the fly to new datasets for the same QA task! On a held-out test dataset with 150 passing images and 14 failing images, we found 93% sensitivity and 77% specifity. That’s not bad for a fly!
I also had Claude put together a dashboard with an animation of the fly performing QA. It’s remarkable what we are able to do with AI agents these days. You can have a fly up and running tasks for a grad student in just a couple hours over the weekend! Ask not what you can do for the fly connectome, ask what the fly connectome can do for you.
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I taught a fly to do MRI quality assurance for me (https://adamsaunders.net/posts/2026/09/17/fly-qa/)
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