Abstract
BackgroundUnderstanding the diversity of eyes is crucial to unravel how different animals use vision to interact with their respective environments. To date, comparative studies of eye anatomy are scarce because they often involve time-consuming or inefficient methods. X-ray micro-tomography (micro-CT) is a promising high-throughput imaging technique that enables to reconstruct the 3D anatomy of eyes, but powerful tools are needed to perform fast conversions of anatomical reconstructions into functional eye models.ResultsWe developed a computing method named InSegtCone to automatically segment the crystalline cones in the apposition compound eyes of arthropods. Here, we describe the full auto-segmentation process, showcase its application to three different insect compound eyes and evaluate its performance. The auto-segmentation could successfully label the full individual shapes of 60-80% of the crystalline cones and is about as accurate and 250 times faster than manual labelling of the individual cones.ConclusionsWe believe that InSegtCone can be an important tool for peer scientists to measure the orientation, size and dynamics of crystalline cones, leading to the accurate optical modelling of the diversity of arthropod eyes with micro-CT.
Highlights
Understanding the diversity of eyes is crucial to unravel how different animals use vision to interact with their respective environments
Arthropods comprise more than 80% of animals living on the planet [20] but little is known about the diversity of the visual systems in this phylum [19]
We demonstrate that the auto-segmentation process can successfully extract the full shapes of 60-80% of the total number of crystalline cones (~ 6000)
Summary
Understanding the diversity of eyes is crucial to unravel how different animals use vision to interact with their respective environments. To better understand how these animals interact with their environment, it is important to carry out anatomical and functional investigations of the myriad of arthropod eyes. Better understanding the eyes of arthropods will inform us about the visual ecology of these. An ommatidium typically consists of three elements: an external lens that forms a regular facet visible on the external surface of the eye, a crystalline cone and a rhabdom [13]. Each ommatidium samples light from a small angular portion of the world that, once integrated, enables arthropods to generate detailed and colourful images across the field of view (FOV) of the compound eye
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