Title
Automatic 3D neuron tracing using all-path pruning.
Abstract
Digital reconstruction, or tracing, of 3D neuron structures is critical toward reverse engineering the wiring and functions of a brain. However, despite a number of existing studies, this task is still challenging, especially when a 3D microscopic image has low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and fragmented neuron segments. Published work can handle these hard situations only by introducing global prior information, such as where a neurite segment starts and terminates. However, manual incorporation of such global information can be very time consuming. Thus, a completely automatic approach for these hard situations is highly desirable.We have developed an automatic graph algorithm, called the all-path pruning (APP), to trace the 3D structure of a neuron. To avoid potential mis-tracing of some parts of a neuron, an APP first produces an initial over-reconstruction, by tracing the optimal geodesic shortest path from the seed location to every possible destination voxel/pixel location in the image. Since the initial reconstruction contains all the possible paths and thus could contain redundant structural components (SC), we simplify the entire reconstruction without compromising its connectedness by pruning the redundant structural elements, using a new maximal-covering minimal-redundant (MCMR) subgraph algorithm. We show that MCMR has a linear computational complexity and will converge. We examined the performance of our method using challenging 3D neuronal image datasets of model organisms (e.g. fruit fly).The software is available upon request. We plan to eventually release the software as a plugin of the V3D-Neuron package at http://penglab.janelia.org/proj/v3d.pengh@janelia.hhmi.org.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1093/bioinformatics/btr237
Bioinformatics [ISMB/ECCB]
Keywords
Field
DocType
neuron structure,initial reconstruction,automatic approach,neuronal image datasets,microscopic image,all-path pruning,digital reconstruction,hard situation,entire reconstruction,fragmented neuron segment,algorithms
Social connectedness,Shortest path problem,Computer science,Reverse engineering,Software,Artificial intelligence,Pixel,Plug-in,Bioinformatics,Machine learning,Tracing,Computational complexity theory
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
27
13
1367-4811
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
52
1.60
21
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hanchuan Peng13930182.27
Fuhui Long230419.27
Eugene Myers33164496.92