6 research outputs found
How to Extract the Geometry and Topology from Very Large 3D Segmentations
Segmentation is often an essential intermediate step in image analysis. A
volume segmentation characterizes the underlying volume image in terms of
geometric information--segments, faces between segments, curves in which
several faces meet--as well as a topology on these objects. Existing algorithms
encode this information in designated data structures, but require that these
data structures fit entirely in Random Access Memory (RAM). Today, 3D images
with several billion voxels are acquired, e.g. in structural neurobiology.
Since these large volumes can no longer be processed with existing methods, we
present a new algorithm which performs geometry and topology extraction with a
runtime linear in the number of voxels and log-linear in the number of faces
and curves. The parallelizable algorithm proceeds in a block-wise fashion and
constructs a consistent representation of the entire volume image on the hard
drive, making the structure of very large volume segmentations accessible to
image analysis. The parallelized C++ source code, free command line tools and
MATLAB mex files are avilable from
http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/software.phpComment: C++ source code, free command line tools and MATLAB mex files are
avilable from http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/software.ph
Runtime-Flexible Multi-dimensional Arrays and Views for C++98 and C++0x
Multi-dimensional arrays are among the most fundamental and most useful data
structures of all. In C++, excellent template libraries exist for arrays whose
dimension is fixed at runtime. Arrays whose dimension can change at runtime
have been implemented in C. However, a generic object-oriented C++
implementation of runtime-flexible arrays has so far been missing. In this
article, we discuss our new implementation called Marray, a package of class
templates that fills this gap. Marray is based on views as an underlying
concept. This concept brings some of the flexibility known from script
languages such as R and MATLAB to C++. Marray is free both for commercial and
non-commercial use and is publicly available from www.andres.sc/marrayComment: Free source code availabl
ilastik: interactive machine learning for (bio)image analysis
We present ilastik, an easy-to-use interactive tool that brings machine-learning-based (bio)image analysis to end users without substantial computational expertise. It contains pre-defined workflows for image segmentation, object classification, counting and tracking. Users adapt the workflows to the problem at hand by interactively providing sparse training annotations for a nonlinear classifier. ilastik can process data in up to five dimensions (3D, time and number of channels). Its computational back end runs operations on-demand wherever possible, allowing for interactive prediction on data larger than RAM. Once the classifiers are trained, ilastik workflows can be applied to new data from the command line without further user interaction. We describe all ilastik workflows in detail, including three
case studies and a discussion on the expected performance
Automated cell nucleus detection for large-volume electron microscopy of neural tissue
Volumetric electron microscopy techniques, such as serial block-face electron microscopy (SBEM), generate massive amounts of image data that are used for reconstructing neural circuits. Typically, this requires time-intensive manual annotation of cells and their connections. To facilitate this analysis, we study the problem of automated detection of cell nuclei in a new SBEM dataset that contains cerebral cortex, white matter, and striatum from an adult mouse brain. The dataset was manually annotated to identify the locations of all 3309 cell nuclei in the volume. We make both dataset and annotations available here. Using a hybrid approach that combines interactive learning, morphological processing, and object level feature classification, we demonstrate automated detection of cell nuclei at 92.4% recall and 95.1% precision. These algorithms are not RAM-limited and can scale to arbitrarily large datasets.Publisher's Versio
Strategic R&D Programme on Technologies for Future Experiments - Annual Report 2020
This report summarises the activities and achievements of the strategic R&D programme on technologies for future experiments in the year 2020