Deep learning based 3D-segmentation of dendritic spines recorded with two-photon in vivo imaging

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Abstract

The automatic detection of dendritic spines in 3D is still a challenging and yet not fully resolved problem with regard to two-photon in-vivo imaging. The emergence of convolutional neural networks (CNN) like U-Nets¹ enabled the development of deep learning based segmentation pipelines for biomedical images in general and for dendritic spines in particular (e.g.^2,3). While these pipelines are most suitable for in-vitro confocal image data, they provide lower prediction accuracy when applied to volumetric in-vivo two-photon images that have a lower signal-to-noise ratio and larger motion artifacts. Thus, researchers of this field still tend to analyze dendritic spines manually, which is time-consuming and prone to human bias. We therefore developed a pipeline for multi-class semantic image segmentation based on a fully convolutional neural network, that specifically targets 3D two-photon in-vivo image data. By choosing U-Net as the underlying network architecture, only a few labeled training images (<50) are required. The U-Net processes 2D images to reduce computation time. A post-hoc 3D connectivity analysis merges the classified spine pixels and reconstructs the 3D morphology. Our pipeline is capable to segment spines from its associated dendrite with 85% accuracy and enables the further analysis of, e.g., spine morphology and spine density.

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References

1. Ronneberger et al. 2015, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.1505.04597 ↩

2. Xiao et al. (2018), doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2018.08.019 ↩

3. Vidaurre-Gallart et al. (2022), doi: 10.3389/fnana.2022.817903 ↩