In-silico reconstruction

Paintera is a general visualization tool for 3D volumetric data and proof-reading in segmentation/reconstruction with a primary focus on neuron reconstruction from electron micrographs in connectomics. It features/supports:

•  Views of orthogonal 2D cross-sections of the data at arbitrary angles and zoom levels
•  Mipmaps for efficient display of arbitrarily large data at arbitrary scale levels
•  Label data
  •  Painting
  •  Manual agglomeration
  •  3D visualization as polygon meshes
    •  Meshes for each mipmap level
    •  Mesh generation on-the-fly via marching cubes to incorporate painted labels and agglomerations in 3D visualization. Marching Cubes is parallelized over small blocks. Only relevant blocks are considered (huge speed-up for sparse label data).

Paintera is implemented in Java and makes extensive use of the UI framework JavaFX

CompuCell3D is a flexible scriptable modeling environment, which allows the rapid construction of sharable Virtual Tissue in-silico simulations of a wide variety of multi-scale, multi-cellular problems including angiogenesis, bacterial colonies, cancer, developmental biology, evolution, the immune system, tissue engineering, toxicology and even non-cellular soft materials. CompuCell3D models have been used to solve basic biological problems, to develop medical therapies, to assess modes of action of toxicants and to design engineered tissues. CompuCell3D intuitive and make Virtual Tissue modeling accessible to users without extensive software development or programming experience.

It uses Cellular Potts Model to model cell behavior.

ilastik is a simple, user-friendly tool for interactive image classification, segmentation and analysis. It is built as a modular software framework, which currently has workflows for automated (supervised) pixel- and object-level classification, automated and semi-automated object tracking, semi-automated segmentation and object counting without detection. Most analysis operations are performed lazily, which enables targeted interactive processing of data subvolumes, followed by complete volume analysis in offline batch mode. Using it requires no experience in image processing.

ilastik (the image learning, analysis, and segmentation toolkit) provides non-experts with a menu of pre-built image analysis workflows. ilastik handles data of up to five dimensions (time, 3D space, and spectral dimension). Its workflows provide an interactive experience to give the user immediate feedback on the quality of the results yielded by her chosen parameters and/or labelings.

The most commonly used workflow is pixel classification, which requires very little parameter tuning and instead offers a machine learning technique for segmenting an image based on local image features computed for each pixel.

Other workflows include:

Object classification: Similar to pixel classification, but classifies previously segmented objects by object characteristics in a subsequent step

Autocontext: This workflow improves the pixel classification workflow by running it in multiple stages and showing each pixel the results of the previous stage.

Carving: Semi-automated segmentation of 3D objects (e.g. neurons) based on user-provided seeds

Manual Tracking: Semi-automated cell tracking of 2D+time or 3D+time images based on manual annotations

Automated tracking: Fully-automated cell tracking of 2D+time or 3D+time images with some parameter tuning

Density Counting: Learned cell population counting based on interactively provided user annotation

Strengths: interactive, simple interface (for non-experts), few parameters, larger-than-RAM data, multi-dimensional data (time, 3D space, channel), headless operation, batch mode, parallelized computation, open source

Weaknesses: Pre-built workflows (not reconfigurable), no plugin system, visualization sometimes buggy, must import 3D data to HDF5, tracking requires an external CPLEX installation

Supported Formats: hdf5, tiff, jpeg, png, bmp, pnm, gif, hdr, exr, sif