3D Tracking of Neural Axons

by

S.P. Yung

Abstract : Under an electronic microscope, axons of neural nerves are packed together and fairly hard to trace their 3D structures.  In practice, these neural axons are cut into consecutive slices and we attempt to identify which axon from which via these cross-section slices. In this talk, an active contour method (snake method) is used to identify individual axons in each slice and then reconstruct the 3D structure of the whole pack of axons. These active contours come from minimizing some functionals and eventually we need to solve a partial differential equation whose discretization becomes a system of linear equations. A repulsive forcing term is added to assist the tracking.