Digitization of Complex 3D Structure by Fast Automatically Structural Tracing Algorithm (FASTA)
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1
National Center for High-Performance Computing, Scientific Computing Division, Taiwan
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2
Academia Sinica, Institute of Physics, Taiwan
In recent years, numerous three-dimensional digital images were taken from confocal laser scanning microscope, X-ray and other imaging techniques for complex structures like neurons, blood vessel, collagen, fibers, etc... However, how to analyze these complex structures to obtain useful information is very challenging. One particular problem, e.g. the tracking of neuron fibers, is essential for quantitative analysis of neurons. Therefore, a very efficient tracing algorithm is crucial and very desirable. At present there are methods and commercial software packages for this function. But it requires a viewer to use his/her vision and judgment to connect or trace the fibers. Not only the task is very labor intensive but the result is susceptible to errors and is usually lack of objectivity. Here we report a new method developed by us which can automatically trace the image data of tree-like or network-like structures, such as neurons and blood vessels, without depending on the human intervention. All image voxels were encoded based on the idea of Huygens principle and traced via these codelets with some stopping criterions. With this method, some characteristic quantity of fibers can be found, for example, the center line, the branch points, the end points, the cross section area, and the branch angles etc…
Keywords:
neuron tracing,
neuroinformatics,
bioimage informatics,
tracing algorithm,
neuron structure
Conference:
Bernstein Conference 2012, Munich, Germany, 12 Sep - 14 Sep, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Data analysis, machine learning, neuroinformatics
Citation:
Chen
N and
Lee
T
(2012). Digitization of Complex 3D Structure by Fast Automatically Structural Tracing Algorithm (FASTA).
Front. Comput. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Bernstein Conference 2012.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fncom.2012.55.00025
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Received:
31 May 2012;
Published Online:
12 Sep 2012.
*
Correspondence:
Prof. Ting-Kuo Lee, Academia Sinica, Institute of Physics, Taipei, Taiwan, tklee@phys.sinica.edu.tw