Project Heads
Peter Hiesinger, Max von Kleist, Steffen Prohaska, Martin Weiser
Project Members
David Knötel (ZIB)
Project Duration
01.01.2019 – 31.12.2021
Located at
ZIB
The brain development of flies (Drosophila) is being observed through 4D (3D + time) 2-photon microscopy. The reconstruction of subcellular structures, here filopodia sprouting from a growth cone, is a challenging task currently done semi-automatically with huge manual effort [1]. We aim at reducing the required human labour by using quantitative models of growth cone and filopodia geometry and dynamics [2] for a more robust and consistent algorithmic identification of subcellular structures. Some of the used methods comprise Bayesian inference, optimization, segmentation using convolutional neural networks, and stochastic modelling.
Dramatic increase of image analysis throughput by model-based filopodia segmentation and tracking compared to semi-automatic reconstruction algorithm previously created at ZIB.
Combining microscopy data and growth dynamics models into a model based filopodia reconstruction loop.
Use Bayesian inference methods for filopodia reconstruction and tracking that can respect user-provided constraints. The prior compares a potential filopodia model to previously known filopodial length dynamics while the likelihood term compares the model to the dataset at hand. Stochastic models based on reconstructed data (using the semi-automatic algorithm) are available for filopodial growth and for synapse formation. Here, only the growth dynamics are relevant and the conditional length distribution is modeled as a sum of Laplace distributions with an exponential vanishing probability (dependent on the length in previous timestep). We use reconstructions generated by the semi-automatic algorithm as training data for a U-Net based Deep-CNN semantic segmentation of filopodia. Additionally, we aim to include topological information into the segmentation framework.
Selected Publications
[1] J. Brummer, V.J. Dercksen, M.N. Ozel, A. Kulkarni, S. Prohaska, D. Baum, P.R. Hiesinger. Semi-automatic Reconstruction and Analysis of Filopodia Dynamics in 4D 2-Photon Microscopy Images. In preparation, 2020.
[2] M.N. Özel, A. Kulkarni, A. Hasan, J. Brummer, M. Moldenhauer, I.M. Daumann et al. Serial synapse formation through filopodial competition for synaptic seeding factors. Developmental cell, 50(4):447–461, 2019.
Selected Pictures
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