An automatic neuron tracing method based on mean shift and minimum spanning tree

Abstract

Digital reconstruction of 3D neuron structures is an important step toward reverse engineering the wiring and functions of a brain. Toward this end, the BigNeuron project bench testing was launched to gather a worldwide community to establish a Big Data resource and a set of the state-of-the-art of single neuron reconstruction algorithms for neuroscience community. As one of the communities, we contribute a Mean shift and Minimum Spanning Tree (M-MST) algorithm to trace single neuron morphology. In our experiment, we have successfully reconstructed 120 Drosophila neurons by using the M-MST algorithm and achieved relatively good difference scores compared with other four algorithms by using APP2 as a reference object.