In the field of connectomics, neuroscientists seek to identify cortical connectivity comprehensively. Neuronal boundary detection from the Electron Microscopy (EM) images is often done to assist the automatic reconstruction of neuronal circuit. But the segmentation of EM images is a challenging problem, as it requires the detector to be able to detect both filament-like thin and blob-like thick membrane, while suppressing the ambiguous intracellular structure. In this paper, we propose multi-stage multi-recursive-input fully convolutional networks to address this problem. The multiple recursive inputs for one stage, i.e., the multiple side outputs with different receptive field sizes learned from the lower stage, provide multi-scale contextual boundary information for the consecutive learning. This design is biologically-plausible, as it likes a human visual system to compare different possible segmentation solutions to address the ambiguous boundary issue. Our multi-stage networks are trained end-to-end. It achieves promising results on two public available EM segmentation datasets, the mouse piriform cortex dataset and the ISBI 2012 EM dataset.
We present a method for hierarchical image segmentation that defines a disaffinity graph on the image, over-segments it into watershed basins, defines a new graph on the basins, and then merges basins with a modified, size-dependent version of single linkage clustering. The quasilinear runtime of the method makes it suitable for segmenting large images. We illustrate the method on the challenging problem of segmenting 3D electron microscopic brain images. We present a new algorithm for automatic and interactive segmentation of neuron structures from electron microscopy (EM) images. Our method selects a collection of nodes from the watershed merging tree as the proposed segmentation. This is achieved by building a conditional random field (CRF) whose underlying graph is the merging tree. The maximum a posteriori (MAP) prediction of the CRF is the output segmentation. Our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Both the inference and the training are very efficient as the graph is tree-structured. Furthermore, we develop an interactive segmentation framework which selects uncertain regions for a user to proofread. The uncertainty is measured by the marginals of the graphical model. Based on user corrections, our framework modifies the merging tree and thus improves the segmentation globally. We present a new automated neuron segmentation algorithm for isotropic 3D electron microscopy data. We cast the problem into the asymmetric multiway cut framework. The latter combines boundary-based segmentation (clustering) with region-based segmentation (semantic labeling) in a single problem and objective function. This joint formulation allows us to augment local boundary evidence with higherlevel biological priors, such as membership to an axonic or dendritic neurite. Joint optimization enforces consistency between evidence and priors, leading to correct resolution of many difficult boundary configurations. We show experimentally on a FIB SEM dataset of mouse cortex that the new approach outperforms existing hierarchical segmentation and multicut algorithms which only use boundary evidence. The watershed is one of the latest segmentation tools developed in mathematical morphology. In order to prevent its oversegmentation, the notion of dynamics of a minimum, based on geodesic reconstruction, has been proposed. In this paper, we extend the notion of dynamics to the contour arcs. This notion acts as a measure of the saliency of the contour. Contrary to the dynamics of minima, our concept reflects the extension and shape of the corresponding object in the image. This representation is also much more natural, because it is expressed in terms of partitions of the plane, i.e., segmentations. A hierarchical segmentation process is then derived, which gives a compact description of the image, containing all the segmentations one can obtain by the notion of dynamics, by means of a simple thresholding. Finally, efficient algorithms for computing the geodesic reconstruction as well as the dynamics of contours are presented. Connectomics based on high resolution ssTEM imagery requires reconstruction of the neuron geometry from histological slides. We present an approach for the automatic membrane segmentation in anisotropic stacks of electron microscopy brain tissue sections. The ambiguities in neuronal segmentation of a section are resolved by using the context from the neighboring sections. We find the global dense correspondence between the sections by SIFT Flow algorithm, evaluate the features of the corresponding pixels and use them to perform the segmentation. Our method is 3.6 and 6.4 more accurate in two different accuracy metrics than the algorithm with no context from other sections. Efforts to automate the reconstruction of neural circuits from 3D electron microscopic (EM) brain images are critical for the field of connectomics. An important computation for reconstruction is the detection of neuronal boundaries. Images acquired by serial section EM, a leading 3D EM technique, are highly anisotropic, with inferior quality along the third dimension. For such images, the 2D max-pooling convolutional network has set the standard for performance at boundary detection. Here we achieve a substantial gain in accuracy through three innovations. Following the trend towards deeper networks for object recognition, we use a much deeper network than previously employed for boundary detection. Second, we incorporate 3D as well as 2D filters, to enable computations that use 3D context. Finally, we adopt a recursively trained architecture in which a first network generates a preliminary boundary map that is provided as input along with the original image to a second network that generates a final boundary map. Back-propagation training is accelerated by ZNN, a new implementation of 3D convolutional networks that uses multicore CPU parallelism for speed. Our hybrid 2D-3D architecture could be more generally applicable to other types of anisotropic 3D images, including video, and our recursive framework for any image labeling problem. We aim to improve segmentation through the use of machine learning tools during region agglomeration. We propose an active learning approach for performing hierarchical agglomerative segmentation from superpixels. Our method combines multiple features at all scales of the agglomerative process, works for data with an arbitrary number of dimensions, and scales to very large datasets. We advocate the use of variation of information to measure segmentation accuracy, particularly in 3D electron microscopy (EM) images of neural tissue, and using this metric demonstrate an improvement over competing algorithms in EM and natural images. In neuroanatomy, automatic geometry extraction of neurons from electron microscopy images is becoming one of the main limiting factors in getting new insights into the functional structure of the brain. We propose a novel framework for tracing neuronal processes over serial sections for 3d reconstructions. The automatic processing pipeline combines the probabilistic output of a random forest classifier with geometrical consistency constraints which take the geometry of whole sections into account. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvement over grouping by Euclidean distance, reducing the split and merge error per object by a factor of two. The study of neural circuit reconstruction, i.e., connectomics, is a challenging problem in neuroscience. Automated and semi-automated electron microscopy (EM) image analysis can be tremendously helpful for connectomics research. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic approach for intra-section segmentation and inter-section reconstruction of neurons using EM images. A hierarchical merge tree structure is built to represent multiple region hypotheses and supervised classification techniques are used to evaluate their potentials, based on which we resolve the merge tree with consistency constraints to acquire final intra-section segmentation. Then, we use a supervised learning based linking procedure for the inter-section neuron reconstruction. Also, we develop a semi-automatic method that utilizes the intermediate outputs of our automatic algorithm and achieves intra-segmentation with minimal user intervention. The experimental results show that our automatic method can achieve close-to-human intra-segmentation accuracy and state-of-the-art inter-section reconstruction accuracy. We also show that our semi-automatic method can further improve the intra-segmentation accuracy. Electron microscopic connectomics is an ambitious research direction with the goal of studying comprehensive brain connectivity maps by using high-throughput, nano-scale microscopy. One of the main challenges in connectomics research is developing scalable image analysis algorithms that require minimal user intervention. Recently, deep learning has drawn much attention in computer vision because of its exceptional performance in image classification tasks. For this reason, its application to connectomic analyses holds great promise, as well. In this paper, we introduce a novel deep neural network architecture, FusionNet, for the automatic segmentation of neuronal structures in connectomics data. FusionNet leverages the latest advances in machine learning, such as semantic segmentation and residual neural networks, with the novel introduction of summation-based skip connections to allow a much deeper network architecture for a more accurate segmentation. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method by comparing it with state-of-the-art electron microscopy (EM) segmentation methods from the ISBI EM segmentation challenge. We also show the segmentation results on two different tasks including cell membrane and cell body segmentation and a statistical analysis of cell morphology. In this paper we present a novel class of so-called Radon-Like features, which allow for aggregation of spatially distributed image statistics into compact feature descriptors. Radon-Like features, which can be efficiently computed, lend themselves for use with both supervised and unsupervised learning methods. Here we describe various instantiations of these features and demonstrate there usefulness in context of neural connectivity analysis, i.e. Connectomics, in electron micrographs. Through various experiments on simulated as well as real data we establish the efficacy of the proposed features in various tasks like cell membrane enhancement, mitochondria segmentation, cell background segmentation, and vesicle cluster detection as compared to various other state-of-the-art techniques. Neuronal networks are high-dimensional graphs that are packed into three-dimensional nervous tissue at extremely high density. Comprehensively mapping these networks is therefore a major challenge. Although recent developments in volume electron microscopy imaging have made data acquisition feasible for circuits comprising a few hundreds to a few thousands of neurons, data analysis is massively lagging behind. The aim of this Perspective is to summarize and quantify the challenges for data analysis in cellular-resolution connectomics and describe current solutions involving online crowd-sourcing and machine-learning approaches. In many neurophysiological studies, understanding the neuronal circuitry of the brain requires detailed 3D models of the nerve cells and their synapses. Typically, researchers build the 3D models by manually tracing the 2D cross-sectional profiles of the 3D structures from serial electron micrograph (EM) stacks and then construct the models from these 2D contours. While current computer-aided techniques can reduce the tracing time, they often require extensive user interaction. We propose a segmentation framework to extract the 2D profiles that is both fast and requires a minimal amount of user interaction. The framework uses graph cuts to minimize an energy defined over the image intensity and the flux of the intensity gradient field. Furthermore, to correct segmentation errors, our framework allows for efficient and intuitive editing of the initial results. Automated neural circuit reconstruction through electron microscopy (EM) images is a challenging problem. In this paper, we present a novel method that exploits multi-scale contextual information together with Radon-like features (RLF) to learn a series of discriminative models. The main idea is to build a framework which is capable of extracting information about cell membranes from a large contextual area of an EM image in a computationally efficient way. Toward this goal, we extract RLF that can be computed efficiently from the input image and generate a scale-space representation of the context images that are obtained at the output of each discriminative model in the series. Compared to a single-scale model, the use of a multi-scale representation of the context image gives the subsequent classifiers access to a larger contextual area in an effective way. Our strategy is general and independent of the classifier and has the potential to be used in any context based framework. We demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in detection of neuron membranes in EM images.