3D reconstruction of neurons in electron microscopy images.

Abstract

With the prevalence of brain-related diseases like Alzheimer in an increasing ageing population, Connectomics, the study of connections between neurons of the human brain, has emerged as a novel and challenging research topic. Accurate and fully automatic algorithms are needed to deal with the increasing amount of data from the brain images. This paper presents an automatic 3D neuron reconstruction technique where neurons within each slice image are first segmented and then linked across multiple slices within the publicly available Electron Microscopy dataset (SNEMI3D). First, random Forest classifier is adapted on top of superpixels for the neuron segmentation within each slice image. The maximum overlap between two consecutive images is then calculated for neuron linking, where the adjacency matrix of two different labeling of the segments is used to distinguish neuron merging and splitting. Experiments over the SNEMI3D dataset show that the proposed technique is efficient and accurate.