Vectorization of optically sectioned brain microvasculature: Learning aids completion of vascular graphs by connecting gaps and deleting open-ended segments

John P. Kaufhold*, Philbert S. Tsai, Pablo Blinder, David Kleinfeld

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

29 Scopus citations

Abstract

A graph of tissue vasculature is an essential requirement to model the exchange of gasses and nutriments between the blood and cells in the brain. Such a graph is derived from a vectorized representation of anatomical data, provides a map of all vessels as vertices and segments, and may include the location of nonvascular components, such as neuronal and glial somata. Yet vectorized data sets typically contain erroneous gaps, spurious endpoints, and spuriously merged strands. Current methods to correct such defects only address the issue of connecting gaps and further require manual tuning of parameters in a high dimensional algorithm. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a supervised machine learning method that (1) connects vessel gaps by "learned threshold relaxation"; (2) removes spurious segments by "learning to eliminate deletion candidate strands"; and (3) enforces consistency in the joint space of learned vascular graph corrections through "consistency learning." Human operators are only required to label individual objects they recognize in a training set and are not burdened with tuning parameters. The supervised learning procedure examines the geometry and topology of features in the neighborhood of each vessel segment under consideration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods on four sets of microvascular data, each with >8003 voxels, obtained with all optical histology of mouse tissue and vectorization by state-of-the-art techniques in image segmentation. Through statistically validated sampling and analysis in terms of precision recall curves, we find that learning with bagged boosted decision trees reduces equal-error error rates for threshold relaxation by 5-21% and strand elimination performance by 18-57%. We benchmark generalization performance across datasets; while improvements vary between data sets, learning always leads to a useful reduction in error rates. Overall, learning is shown to more than halve the total error rate, and therefore, human time spent manually correcting such vectorizations.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1241-1258
Number of pages18
JournalMedical Image Analysis
Volume16
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2012
Externally publishedYes

Funding

FundersFunder number
National Institutes of HealthEB003832, OD006831
National Institute of Mental HealthR01MH085499

    Keywords

    • Anatomy
    • Gap filling
    • Neurovascular coupling
    • Skeleton
    • Two photon microscopy

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