Fast, Simple Calcium Imaging Segmentation with Fully Convolutional Networks

Abstract

Calcium imaging is a technique for observing neuron activity as a series of images showing indicator fluorescence over time. Manually segmenting neurons is time-consuming, leading to research on automated calcium imaging segmentation (ACIS). We evaluated several deep learning models for ACIS on the Neurofinder competition datasets and report our best model: U-Net2DS, a fully convolutional network that operates on 2D mean summary images. U-Net2DS requires minimal domain-specific pre/post-processing and parameter adjustment, and predictions are made on full $512\times512$ images at $\approx$9K images per minute. It ranks third in the Neurofinder competition ($F_1=0.569$) and is the best model to exclusively use deep learning. We also demonstrate useful segmentations on data from outside the competition. The model's simplicity, speed, and quality results make it a practical choice for ACIS and a strong baseline for more complex models in the future. Comment: Accepted to 3rd Workshop on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis (http://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~dlmia3/)

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Keywords

Computer science

Citation

Klibisz, A., Rose, D., Eicholtz, M., Blundon, J., & Zakharenko, S. (2017). Fast, Simple Calcium Imaging Segmentation with Fully Convolutional Networks.

DOI

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