Annotated Dendrograms for Neurons From the Larval Fruit Fly Brain
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Date
2018
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
Recent advances in neuroscience have made it possible to reconstruct all neurons of an entire neural circuit in the larval fruit fly brain from serial electron microscopy image stacks. The reconstructed neurons are morphologically complex 3D graphs whose nodes are annotated with labels representing different types of synapses. Here, we propose a method to draw simplified, yet realistic 2D neuron sketches of insect neurons in order to help biologists formulate hypotheses on neural function at the microcircuit level. The sketches are dendrograms that capture a neuron's branching structure and that preserve branch lengths, providing realistic estimates for distances and signal travel times between synapses. To improve readability of the often densely clustered synapse annotations, synapses are automatically summarized in local clusters of synapses of the same type and arranged to minimize label overlap. We show that two major neuron classes of an olfactory circuit in the larval fruit fly brain can be discriminated visually based on the dendrograms. Unsupervised and supervised data analysis reveals that class discrimination can be performed using morphological features derived from the dendrograms.
Description
@inproceedings{10.2312:vcbm.20181229,
booktitle = {Eurographics Workshop on Visual Computing for Biology and Medicine},
editor = {Puig Puig, Anna and Schultz, Thomas and Vilanova, Anna and Hotz, Ingrid and Kozlikova, Barbora and Vázquez, Pere-Pau},
title = {{Annotated Dendrograms for Neurons From the Larval Fruit Fly Brain}},
author = {Strauch, Martin and Hartenstein, Volker and Andrade, Ingrid V. and Cardona, Albert and Merhof, Dorit},
year = {2018},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {2070-5786},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-056-7},
DOI = {10.2312/vcbm.20181229}
}