Interactive Mining for Large-scale Neuro-Morphological Datasets

1 online resource (96 pages) : PDF

2018

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

In this dissertation, we aim to investigate advanced methods for the computational analytics of large-scale neuro-morphological datasets, which can help neuroscientists interactively explore neurons in real-time. Particularly, we tackle the neuro-morphological analytics into three inter-related components: 1) quantitative descriptions for 3D neuron morphologies, i.e., computing effective features that can differentiate subtle difference among massive neurons; 2) large-scale neuron mining, i.e., efficiently indexing neurons with similar morphologies in large-scale datasets; 3) interactively neuron exploration and visualization, i.e., developing neuron visualization tools and bring human in the loop to explore neurons in an interactive and immersive manner. We propose a series of methods in tackling problems related to the above three components. Regarding the quantitative description, we develop a deep learning framework based on neuron projection, which can transform 3D neurons into 2D images and learn effective neuron features. Regarding the large-scale neuron mining, binary coding methods are introduced, which can transform feature vectors into short binary codes for real-time indexing and mining. Regarding the interactive neuron exploration, we visualize 3D neurons using augmented reality (AR) techniques, where users can provide relevance feedback to further improve the mining performance. The proposed methods are validated on the currently largest neuron database including more than 58,000 neurons, achieving state-of-the-art performance in comparison with other related methods. More importantly, we demonstrate use cases of our framework in multiple neuron analysis and exploration tasks, showing its potential benefits in facilitating the research of neuroscience.

doctoral dissertations

Computer science
Neurosciences
Biomedical engineering

Ph.D.

Augmented Reality
Deep Learning
Large-Scale Retrieval
Neuron Morphology
User Interaction

Computer Science

Zhang, Shaoting

Zhang, Shaoting
Shi, Xinghua
Lu, Aidong
Shin, Min

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2018.

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Li_uncc_0694D_11821

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13093/etd:723