A Novel Semi-automated Proofreading and Mesh Error Detection Pipeline for Neuron Extension.

The immense scale and complexity of neuronal electron microscopy (EM) datasets pose significant challenges in data processing, validation, and interpretation, necessitating the development of efficient, automated, and scalable error-detection methodologies. This paper proposes a novel approach that employs mesh processing techniques to identify potential error locations near neuronal tips. Error detection at tips is a particularly important challenge since these errors usually indicate that many synapses are falsely split from their parent neuron, injuring the integrity of the connectomic reconstruction. Additionally, we draw implications and results from an implementation of this error detection in a semi-automated proofreading pipeline. Manual proofreading is a laborious, costly, and currently necessary method for identifying the errors in the machine learning based segmentation of neural tissue. This approach streamlines the process of proofreading by systematically highlighting areas likely to contain inaccuracies and guiding proofreaders towards potential continuations, accelerating the rate at which errors are corrected.

Computation of resting state networks from fMRI through a measure of phase synchrony.

Resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) studies of the human brain have demonstrated that low-frequency fluctuations can define functionally relevant resting state networks (RSNs). The majority of these methods rely on Pearson's correlation for quantifying the functional connectivity between the time series from different regions. However, it is well-known that correlation is limited to quantifying only linear relationships between the time series and assumes stationarity of the underlying processes. Many empirical studies indicate nonstationarity of the BOLD signals. In this paper, we adapt a measure of time-varying phase synchrony to quantify the functional connectivity and modify it to distinguish between synchronization and desynchronization. The proposed measure is compared to the conventional Pearson's correlation method for rs-fMRI analyses on two subjects (six scans per subject) in terms of their reproducibility.