Modeling Brain Circuitry over a Wide Range of Scales

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of computer vision techniques to integrate high-resolution electron and light microscopy data, enabling detailed modeling of brain circuitry across multiple scales.

Contribution

It introduces novel methods for delineating dendritic structures, segmenting organelles, and combining multimodal microscopy data for comprehensive brain wiring analysis.

Findings

Automated dendritic arbor delineation from light microscopy

Segmentation of organelles from electron microscopy

Integrated multimodal brain structure representation

Abstract

If we are ever to unravel the mysteries of brain function at its most fundamental level, we will need a precise understanding of how its component neurons connect to each other. Electron Microscopes (EM) can now provide the nanometer resolution that is needed to image synapses, and therefore connections, while Light Microscopes (LM) see at the micrometer resolution required to model the 3D structure of the dendritic network. Since both the topology and the connection strength are integral parts of the brain's wiring diagram, being able to combine these two modalities is critically important. In fact, these microscopes now routinely produce high-resolution imagery in such large quantities that the bottleneck becomes automated processing and interpretation, which is needed for such data to be exploited to its full potential. In this paper, we briefly review the Computer Vision techniques we have developed at EPFL to address this need. They include delineating dendritic arbors from LM imagery, segmenting organelles from EM, and combining the two into a consistent representation.