The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Recent advances in microscopy have enabled the collection of large amounts of microscopic data at rapid rates. The size and rate of acquisition of these "high throughput" microscopic data sets present new opportunities in understanding the structure and function of organs, but also present new challenges in the processing, analysis, and visualization of the data. This talk will describe some of the challenges and opportunities coming from an effort to reconstruct the mouse brain. This talk will focus particularly on work being done in the Brain Networks Laboratory (BNL) at Texas A&M University. The BNL works with data scanned from a Knife-Edge Scanning Microscope (KESM) developed in our lab. Our particular emphasis has been the scanning and reconstruction of neuronal and microvascular data from mouse brain. This talk will present an overview of the KESM and other high-throughput techniques, along with the challenges in image processing, segmentation, reconstruction, and visualization. Of particular interest are long, thin structures encountered in the brain, such as neuronal processes and microvasculature. We will discuss some of the algorithms used to segment and reconstruct this data, along with methods used to provide useful visualizations to collaborators interested in gaining better understanding of the data.