Chasing the neurome: Segmentation and comparison of neurons

The neuronal content of an organism, the individual morphology of each neuron and the variability of these components constitute the atlas of the neurome. The description of such an atlas will be critical in determining the complex neural system of a given organism, eventually providing clues to how animals think and function. As the organisms under investigation scale from the worm to the human, the number of neurons scale from tens to millions. Image analysis is a key ingredient in tackling a neurome for complex organisms. Specifically, two major problems stand between the state of the art and successful automation. First, neurons must be segmented from microscopy, yielding a morphological description of each individual neuron. Second, these neurons must be matched to prototypes and classified by function. This report describes current progress on these two fronts, revealing encouraging progress as demonstrated on the fruit fly Drosophila.