학술논문

CONFIRMS: A Toolkit for Scalable, Black Box Connectome Assessment and Investigation
Document Type
Conference
Source
2021 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC) Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC), 2021 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE. :2444-2450 Nov, 2021
Subject
Bioengineering
Wiring
Neurological diseases
Image segmentation
Three-dimensional displays
Neurons
Ecosystems
Nanoscale devices
Language
ISSN
2694-0604
Abstract
The nanoscale connectomics community has recently generated automated and semi-automated "wiring diagrams" of brain subregions from terabytes and petabytes of dense 3D neuroimagery. This process involves many challenging and imperfect technical steps, including dense 3D image segmentation, anisotropic nonrigid image alignment and coregistration, and pixel classification of each neuron and their individual synaptic connections. As data volumes continue to grow in size, and connectome generation becomes increasingly commonplace, it is important that the scientific community is able to rapidly assess the quality and accuracy of a connectome product to promote dataset analysis and reuse. In this work, we share our scalable toolkit for assessing the quality of a connectome reconstruction via targeted inquiry and large-scale graph analysis, and to provide insights into how such connectome proofreading processes may be improved and optimized in the future. We illustrate the applications and ecosystem on a recent reference dataset.Clinical relevance— Large-scale electron microscopy (EM) data offers a novel opportunity to characterize etiologies and neurological diseases and conditions at an unprecedented scale. EM is useful for low-level analyses such as biopsies; this increased scale offers new possibilities for research into areas such as neural networks if certain bottlenecks and problems are overcome.