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38 Publications

Showing 31-38 of 38 results
05/24/18 | The candidate multi-cut for cell segmentation.
Funke J, Zhang C, Pietzsch T, Gonzalez Ballester MA, Saalfeld S
2018 IEEE 15th International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2018). 2017 Jul 04:. doi: 10.1109/ISBI.2018.8363658

Two successful approaches for the segmentation of biomedical images are (1) the selection of segment candidates from a merge-tree, and (2) the clustering of small superpixels by solving a Multi-Cut problem. In this paper, we introduce a model that unifies both approaches. Our model, the Candidate Multi-Cut (CMC), allows joint selection and clustering of segment candidates from a merge-tree. This way, we overcome the respective limitations of the individual methods: (1) the space of possible segmentations is not constrained to candidates of a merge-tree, and (2) the decision for clustering can be made on candidates larger than superpixels, using features over larger contexts. We solve the optimization problem of selecting and clustering of candidates using an integer linear program. On datasets of 2D light microscopy of cell populations and 3D electron microscopy of neurons, we show that our method generalizes well and generates more accurate segmentations than merge-tree or Multi-Cut methods alone.

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07/22/23 | Towards Generalizable Organelle Segmentation in Volume Electron Microscopy.
Heinrich L, Patton W, Bennett D, Ackerman D, Park G, Bogovic JA, Eckstein N, Petruncio A, Clements J, Pang S, Shan Xu C, Funke J, Korff W, Hess H, Lippincott-Schwartz J, Saalfeld S, Weigel A, CellMap Project Team
Microscopy and Microanalysis. 2023 Jul 22;29(Supplement_1):975. doi: 10.1093/micmic/ozad067.487
09/22/22 | Tracking by Weakly-Supervised Learning and Graph Optimization for Whole-Embryo C. elegans lineages
Wang L, Dou Q, Fletcher PT, Speidel S, Li S
International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention. 2022 Sep 16:. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-16440-8

Tracking all nuclei of an embryo in noisy and dense fluorescence microscopy data is a challenging task. We build upon a recent method for nuclei tracking that combines weakly-supervised learning from a small set of nuclei center point annotations with an integer linear program (ILP) for optimal cell lineage extraction. Our work specifically addresses the following challenging properties of C. elegans embryo recordings: (1) Many cell divisions as compared to benchmark recordings of other organisms, and (2) the presence of polar bodies that are easily mistaken as cell nuclei. To cope with (1), we devise and incorporate a learnt cell division detector. To cope with (2), we employ a learnt polar body detector. We further propose automated ILP weights tuning via a structured SVM, alleviating the need for tedious manual set-up of a respective grid search.

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03/26/22 | Transverse endoplasmic reticulum expansion in hereditary spastic paraplegia corticospinal axons.
Zhu P, Hung H, Batchenkova N, Nixon-Abell J, Henderson J, Zheng P, Renvoisé B, Pang S, Xu CS, Saalfeld S, Funke J, Xie Y, Svara F, Hess HF, Blackstone C
Human Molecular Genetics. 2022 Mar 26:. doi: 10.1093/hmg/ddac072

Hereditary spastic paraplegias (HSPs) comprise a large group of inherited neurologic disorders affecting the longest corticospinal axons (SPG1-86 plus others), with shared manifestations of lower extremity spasticity and gait impairment. Common autosomal dominant HSPs are caused by mutations in genes encoding the microtubule-severing ATPase spastin (SPAST; SPG4), the membrane-bound GTPase atlastin-1 (ATL1; SPG3A), and the reticulon-like, microtubule-binding protein REEP1 (REEP1; SPG31). These proteins bind one another and function in shaping the tubular endoplasmic reticulum (ER) network. Typically, mouse models of HSPs have mild, later-onset phenotypes, possibly reflecting far shorter lengths of their corticospinal axons relative to humans. Here, we have generated a robust, double mutant mouse model of HSP in which atlastin-1 is genetically modified with a K80A knock-in (KI) missense change that abolishes its GTPase activity, while its binding partner Reep1 is knocked out. Atl1KI/KI/Reep1-/- mice exhibit early-onset and rapidly progressive declines in several motor function tests. Also, ER in mutant corticospinal axons dramatically expands transversely and periodically in a mutation dosage-dependent manner to create a ladder-like appearance, based on reconstructions of focused ion beam-scanning electron microscopy datasets using machine learning-based auto-segmentation. In lockstep with changes in ER morphology, axonal mitochondria are fragmented and proportions of hypophosphorylated neurofilament H and M subunits are dramatically increased in Atl1KI/KI/Reep1-/- spinal cord. Co-occurrence of these findings links ER morphology changes to alterations in mitochondrial morphology and cytoskeletal organization. Atl1KI/KI/Reep1-/- mice represent an early-onset rodent HSP model with robust behavioral and cellular readouts for testing novel therapies.

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08/23/22 | Transverse endoplasmic reticulum expansion in hereditary spastic paraplegia corticospinal axons.
Zhu P, Hung H, Batchenkova N, Nixon-Abell J, Henderson J, Zheng P, Renvoisé B, Pang S, Xu CS, Saalfeld S, Funke J, Xie Y, Svara F, Hess HF, Blackstone C
Human Molecular Genetics. 2022 Aug 23;31(16):2779-2795. doi: 10.1093/hmg/ddac072

Hereditary spastic paraplegias (HSPs) comprise a large group of inherited neurologic disorders affecting the longest corticospinal axons (SPG1-86 plus others), with shared manifestations of lower extremity spasticity and gait impairment. Common autosomal dominant HSPs are caused by mutations in genes encoding the microtubule-severing ATPase spastin (SPAST; SPG4), the membrane-bound GTPase atlastin-1 (ATL1; SPG3A) and the reticulon-like, microtubule-binding protein REEP1 (REEP1; SPG31). These proteins bind one another and function in shaping the tubular endoplasmic reticulum (ER) network. Typically, mouse models of HSPs have mild, later onset phenotypes, possibly reflecting far shorter lengths of their corticospinal axons relative to humans. Here, we have generated a robust, double mutant mouse model of HSP in which atlastin-1 is genetically modified with a K80A knock-in (KI) missense change that abolishes its GTPase activity, whereas its binding partner Reep1 is knocked out. Atl1KI/KI/Reep1-/- mice exhibit early onset and rapidly progressive declines in several motor function tests. Also, ER in mutant corticospinal axons dramatically expands transversely and periodically in a mutation dosage-dependent manner to create a ladder-like appearance, on the basis of reconstructions of focused ion beam-scanning electron microscopy datasets using machine learning-based auto-segmentation. In lockstep with changes in ER morphology, axonal mitochondria are fragmented and proportions of hypophosphorylated neurofilament H and M subunits are dramatically increased in Atl1KI/KI/Reep1-/- spinal cord. Co-occurrence of these findings links ER morphology changes to alterations in mitochondrial morphology and cytoskeletal organization. Atl1KI/KI/Reep1-/- mice represent an early onset rodent HSP model with robust behavioral and cellular readouts for testing novel therapies.

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10/01/23 | Unsupervised Learning of Object-Centric Embeddings for Cell Instance Segmentation in Microscopy Images
Wolf S, Lalit M, McDole K, Funke J
2023 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). 2023 Oct 01:. doi: 10.1109/ICCV51070.2023.01944

Segmentation of objects in microscopy images is required for many biomedical applications. We introduce object-centric embeddings (OCEs), which embed image patches such that the spatial offsets between patches cropped from the same object are preserved. Those learnt embeddings can be used to delineate individual objects and thus obtain instance segmentations. Here, we show theoretically that, under assumptions commonly found in microscopy images, OCEs can be learnt through a self-supervised task that predicts the spatial offset between image patches. Together, this forms an unsupervised cell instance segmentation method which we evaluate on nine diverse large-scale microscopy datasets. Segmentations obtained with our method lead to substantially improved results, compared to state-of-the-art baselines on six out of nine datasets, and perform on par on the remaining three datasets. If ground-truth annotations are available, our method serves as an excellent starting point for supervised training, reducing the required amount of ground-truth needed by one order of magnitude, thus substantially increasing the practical applicability of our method. Source code is available at github.com/funkelab/cellulus.

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11/18/15 | Who is talking to whom: Synaptic partner detection in anisotropic volumes of insect brain.
Kreshuk A, Funke J, Cardona A, Hamprecht FA
Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention -- MICCAI 2015:661-8. 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.

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11/01/21 | Whole-cell organelle segmentation in volume electron microscopy.
Heinrich L, Bennett D, Ackerman D, Park W, Bogovic J, Eckstein N, Petruncio A, Clements J, Pang S, Xu CS, Funke J, Korff W, Hess HF, Lippincott-Schwartz J, Saalfeld S, Weigel AV, COSEM Project Team
Nature. 2021 Nov 01;599(7883):141-46. doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-03977-3

Cells contain hundreds of organelles and macromolecular assemblies. Obtaining a complete understanding of their intricate organization requires the nanometre-level, three-dimensional reconstruction of whole cells, which is only feasible with robust and scalable automatic methods. Here, to support the development of such methods, we annotated up to 35 different cellular organelle classes-ranging from endoplasmic reticulum to microtubules to ribosomes-in diverse sample volumes from multiple cell types imaged at a near-isotropic resolution of 4 nm per voxel with focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM). We trained deep learning architectures to segment these structures in 4 nm and 8 nm per voxel FIB-SEM volumes, validated their performance and showed that automatic reconstructions can be used to directly quantify previously inaccessible metrics including spatial interactions between cellular components. We also show that such reconstructions can be used to automatically register light and electron microscopy images for correlative studies. We have created an open data and open-source web repository, 'OpenOrganelle', to share the data, computer code and trained models, which will enable scientists everywhere to query and further improve automatic reconstruction of these datasets.

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