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Updated: Apr 25, 2026
Micron-scale Resolution Optical Tomography of Entire Mouse Brains with Confocal Light Sheet Microscopy
Published on: October 8, 2013
Large-scale automated identification of mouse brain cells in confocal light sheet microscopy images
Paolo Frasconi1, Ludovico Silvestri1, Paolo Soda1
1Department of Information Engineering (DINFO), Università di Firenze, 50139 Firenze, Italy, European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy (LENS), Università di Firenze, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy and Integrated Research Centre, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, 00128 Rome, Italy.
Motivation:
Recently, confocal light sheet microscopy has enabled high-throughput acquisition of whole mouse brain 3D images at the micron scale resolution. This poses the unprecedented challenge of creating accurate digital maps of the whole set of cells in a brain.
Results:
We introduce a fast and scalable algorithm for fully automated cell identification. We obtained the whole digital map of Purkinje cells in mouse cerebellum consisting of a set of 3D cell center coordinates. The method is accurate and we estimated an F1 measure of 0.96 using 56 representative volumes, totaling 1.09 GVoxel and containing 4138 manually annotated soma centers.
Availability And Implementation:
Source code and its documentation are available at http://bcfind.dinfo.unifi.it/. The whole pipeline of methods is implemented in Python and makes use of Pylearn2 and modified parts of Scikit-learn. Brain images are available on request.
Supplementary Information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
