Who Is Talking to Whom: Synaptic Partner Detection in Anisotropic Volumes of Insect Brain

• Published in: Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention -- MICCAI 2015 pp. 661 - 668
• Main Authors: Kreshuk, Anna, Funke, Jan, Cardona, Albert, Hamprecht, Fred A.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Circuit reconstruction; electron microscopy; graphical model
• ISBN: 331924552X; 9783319245522
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-24553-9_81

Automated reconstruction of neural connectivity graphs from electron microscopy image stacks is an essential step towards large-scale neural circuit mapping. While significant progress has recently been made in automated segmentation of neurons and detection of synapses, the problem of synaptic partner assignment for polyadic (one-to-many) synapses, prevalent in the Drosophila brain, remains unsolved. In this contribution, we propose a method which automatically assigns pre- and postsynaptic roles to neurites adjacent to a synaptic site. The method constructs a probabilistic graphical model over potential synaptic partner pairs which includes factors to account for a high rate of one-to-many connections, as well as the possibility of the same neuron to be pre-synaptic in one synapse and post-synaptic in another. The algorithm has been validated on a publicly available stack of ssTEM images of Drosophila neural tissue and has been shown to reconstruct most of the synaptic relations correctly.