Soma Detection in 3D Images of Neurons using Machine Learning Technique.

Journal: Neuroinformatics
Published Date:

Abstract

Computing and analyzing the neuronal structure is essential to studying connectome. Two important tasks for such analysis are finding the soma and constructing the neuronal structure. Finding the soma is considered more important because it is required for some neuron tracing algorithms. We describe a robust automatic soma detection method developed based on the machine learning technique. Images of neurons were three-dimensional confocal microscopic images in the FlyCircuit database. The testing data were randomly selected raw images that contained noises and partial neuronal structures. The number of somas in the images was not known in advance. Our method tries to identify all the somas in the images. Experimental results showed that the method is efficient and robust.

Authors

  • Guan-Wei He
    Department of Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, 30010, Taiwan.
  • Ting-Yuan Wang
    Institute of Biotechnology and Department of Life Science, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, 30013, Taiwan.
  • Ann-Shyn Chiang
    Institute of Biotechnology and Department of Life Science, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, 30013, Taiwan.
  • Yu-Tai Ching
    Department of Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, 30010, Taiwan. ytc@cs.nctu.edu.tw.