# Synaptic Partner Assignment Using Attentional Voxel Association Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09947 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09947/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [An Out-of-Domain Synapse Detection Challenge for Microwasp Brain Connectomes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00545/) (2023)
- [Domain Adaptive Synapse Detection with Weak Point Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16461/) (2023)
- [TriSAM: Tri-Plane SAM for zero-shot cortical blood vessel segmentation in VEM images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13961/) (2024)
- [ConnectomeBench2: A Unified Benchmark for Automated Connectomic Proofreading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21116/) (2026)
- [Towards Generalized Synapse Detection Across Invertebrate Species](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17041/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Synapse Detection and Proofreading in Connectomics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36492/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Connectomics aims to recover a complete set of synaptic connections within a dataset imaged by volume electron microscopy. Many systems have been proposed for locating synapses, and recent research has included a way to identify the synaptic partners that communicate at a synaptic cleft. We re-frame the problem of identifying synaptic partners as directly generating the mask of the synaptic partners from a given cleft. We train a convolutional network to perform this task. The network takes the local image context and a binary mask representing a single cleft as input. It is trained to produce two binary output masks: one which labels the voxels of the presynaptic partner within the input image, and another similar labeling for the postsynaptic partner. The cleft mask acts as an attentional gating signal for the network. We find that an implementation of this approach performs well on a dataset of mouse somatosensory cortex, and evaluate it as part of a combined system to predict both clefts and connections.