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Identifying Weak Signals in Inhomogeneous Neuronal Images for Large-Scale Tracing of Sparsely Distributed Neurites

Tracing neurites constitutes the core of neuronal morphology reconstruction, a key step toward neuronal circuit mapping. Modern optical-imaging techniques allow observation of nearly complete mouse neuron morphologies across brain regions or even the whole brain. However, high-level automation recon...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Li, Shiwei, Quan, Tingwei, Zhou, Hang, Yin, FangFang, Li, Anan, Fu, Ling, Luo, Qingming, Gong, Hui, Zeng, Shaoqun
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6841657/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30635864
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12021-018-9414-9
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author Li, Shiwei
Quan, Tingwei
Zhou, Hang
Yin, FangFang
Li, Anan
Fu, Ling
Luo, Qingming
Gong, Hui
Zeng, Shaoqun
author_facet Li, Shiwei
Quan, Tingwei
Zhou, Hang
Yin, FangFang
Li, Anan
Fu, Ling
Luo, Qingming
Gong, Hui
Zeng, Shaoqun
author_sort Li, Shiwei
collection PubMed
description Tracing neurites constitutes the core of neuronal morphology reconstruction, a key step toward neuronal circuit mapping. Modern optical-imaging techniques allow observation of nearly complete mouse neuron morphologies across brain regions or even the whole brain. However, high-level automation reconstruction of neurons, i.e., the reconstruction with a few of manual edits requires discrimination of weak foreground points from the inhomogeneous background. We constructed an identification model, where empirical observations made from neuronal images were summarized into rules for designing feature vectors that to classify foreground and background, and a support vector machine (SVM) was used to learn these feature vectors. We embedded this constructed SVM classifier into a previously developed tool, SparseTracer, to obtain SparseTracer-Learned Feature Vector (ST-LFV). ST-LFV can trace sparsely distributed neurites with weak signals (contrast-to-noise ratio < 1.5) against an inhomogeneous background in datasets imaged by widely used light-microscopy techniques like confocal microscopy and two-photon microscopy. Moreover, 12 sub-blocks were extracted from different brain regions. The average recall and precision rates were 99% and 97%, respectively. These results indicated that ST-LFV is well suited for weak signal identification with varying image characteristics. We also applied ST-LFV to trace long-range neurites from images where neurites are sparsely distributed but their image intensities are weak in some cases. When tracing this long-range neurites, manual edit was required once to obtain results equivalent to the ground truth, compared with 20 times of manual edits required by SparseTracer. This improvement in the level of automatic reconstruction indicates that ST-LFV has the potential to rapidly reconstruct sparsely distributed neurons at the large scale. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s12021-018-9414-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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spelling pubmed-68416572019-11-20 Identifying Weak Signals in Inhomogeneous Neuronal Images for Large-Scale Tracing of Sparsely Distributed Neurites Li, Shiwei Quan, Tingwei Zhou, Hang Yin, FangFang Li, Anan Fu, Ling Luo, Qingming Gong, Hui Zeng, Shaoqun Neuroinformatics Original Article Tracing neurites constitutes the core of neuronal morphology reconstruction, a key step toward neuronal circuit mapping. Modern optical-imaging techniques allow observation of nearly complete mouse neuron morphologies across brain regions or even the whole brain. However, high-level automation reconstruction of neurons, i.e., the reconstruction with a few of manual edits requires discrimination of weak foreground points from the inhomogeneous background. We constructed an identification model, where empirical observations made from neuronal images were summarized into rules for designing feature vectors that to classify foreground and background, and a support vector machine (SVM) was used to learn these feature vectors. We embedded this constructed SVM classifier into a previously developed tool, SparseTracer, to obtain SparseTracer-Learned Feature Vector (ST-LFV). ST-LFV can trace sparsely distributed neurites with weak signals (contrast-to-noise ratio < 1.5) against an inhomogeneous background in datasets imaged by widely used light-microscopy techniques like confocal microscopy and two-photon microscopy. Moreover, 12 sub-blocks were extracted from different brain regions. The average recall and precision rates were 99% and 97%, respectively. These results indicated that ST-LFV is well suited for weak signal identification with varying image characteristics. We also applied ST-LFV to trace long-range neurites from images where neurites are sparsely distributed but their image intensities are weak in some cases. When tracing this long-range neurites, manual edit was required once to obtain results equivalent to the ground truth, compared with 20 times of manual edits required by SparseTracer. This improvement in the level of automatic reconstruction indicates that ST-LFV has the potential to rapidly reconstruct sparsely distributed neurons at the large scale. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s12021-018-9414-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Springer US 2019-01-11 2019 /pmc/articles/PMC6841657/ /pubmed/30635864 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12021-018-9414-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Original Article
Li, Shiwei
Quan, Tingwei
Zhou, Hang
Yin, FangFang
Li, Anan
Fu, Ling
Luo, Qingming
Gong, Hui
Zeng, Shaoqun
Identifying Weak Signals in Inhomogeneous Neuronal Images for Large-Scale Tracing of Sparsely Distributed Neurites
title Identifying Weak Signals in Inhomogeneous Neuronal Images for Large-Scale Tracing of Sparsely Distributed Neurites
title_full Identifying Weak Signals in Inhomogeneous Neuronal Images for Large-Scale Tracing of Sparsely Distributed Neurites
title_fullStr Identifying Weak Signals in Inhomogeneous Neuronal Images for Large-Scale Tracing of Sparsely Distributed Neurites
title_full_unstemmed Identifying Weak Signals in Inhomogeneous Neuronal Images for Large-Scale Tracing of Sparsely Distributed Neurites
title_short Identifying Weak Signals in Inhomogeneous Neuronal Images for Large-Scale Tracing of Sparsely Distributed Neurites
title_sort identifying weak signals in inhomogeneous neuronal images for large-scale tracing of sparsely distributed neurites
topic Original Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6841657/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30635864
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12021-018-9414-9
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