The aim of the project was to identify symbiotic interactions between plankton species sampled from many ocean sites as part of the Tara Ocean project. The goal is to facilitate the investigation of plankton symbiosis. For example one such use case enabled by speeding up the identification of symbiotic interactions could be to allow the use of feedback microscopy to focus specifically on symbitoc interactions.
The archive contains 1,235,640 objects, with a subset (89,864) having been labeled with human validation. However, of those, only 391 validated images contain confirmed symbiotic interactions with the rest being negative labels. The patch set is available on EcoTaxa and the underlying imaging method is described in Colin et al..
To obtain more label coverage, the group intended to use a prediction mode in EcoTaxa that uses features, computed externally during patch processing, to group like patches for labeling. However, unfortuntely the processing code contained a bug, such that features and their images no longer aligned. This makes the further labeling of sybiotic interactions infeasible. Attempts to correct this with the original author have not yet been successful. Even if this code were corrected, increasing the coverage of labels would require significant time from expert annotators.
In the light of this unexpected problem with data availability the project was unable to progress further.