Method of extracting axon fibers and clusters

Abstract

The extraction and pre-cueing of axon fibers and clusters is performed on transmission electron micrograph (TEM) image mosaics to reduce neuroanatomist workload. Given a multiplicity of myelin-sheathed axon fibers in a cross-sectional image containing many such fibers, the inventive method uses these grey-level operators to effectively identify co-occurrences of the axon fibers and their myelin sheaths and output a result representative of these co-occurrences. The co-occurrences may then be sorted in terms of their geometry to identify groups of fibers indicative of axon clusters. Specifically, a grey-level opening and conditional dilation is performed on the image to obtain a first residue representative of potential axons A grey-level closing and conditional erosion of the first opening image is then performed to obtain a second residue representative of potential axon fibers, including their respective myelin sheaths. The first residue may then be used as a marker to conditionally dilate over the second residue to identify the co-occurrences. The method of the invention significantly reduces the workload of the reviewers by identifying roughly 95 percent of the axons, with only a one to two percent false alarm rate, based on a reasonable computation time of about one hour per sample on a fast workstation.