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Developing a brain atlas through deep learning

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 1, pages 277–287 (2019)Cite this article

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A preprint version of the article is available at arXiv.

Abstract

Neuroscientists have devoted substantial effort to the creation of standard brain reference atlases for high-throughput registration of anatomical regions of interest. However, the variability in brain size and form across individuals poses a considerable challenge for such reference atlases. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a fully automated deep neural network-based method (named SeBRe) for segmenting brain regions of interest with minimal human supervision. We demonstrate the validity of our method on brain images from different developmental time points of mice, across a range of neuronal markers and imaging modalities. We further assess the performance of our method on images of magnetic resonance-scanned human brains. Our registration method can accelerate brain-wide exploration of region-specific changes in brain development and, by easily segmenting brain regions of interest for high-throughput brain-wide analysis, offer an alternative to existing complex brain registration techniques.

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Fig. 1: Architecture of the SeBRe deep learning pipeline.
Fig. 2: SeBRe multistage image processing pipeline.
Fig. 3: The performance of SeBRe in segmenting brain regions.
Fig. 4: The rotationally invariant performance of SeBRe on the extended mouse dataset.
Fig. 5: The generalized performance of SeBRe on unseen FISH brain sections.
Fig. 6: The performance of SeBRe in segmenting subregions of the hippocampus.
Fig. 7: Performance of SeBRe on human brain sections.
Fig. 8: A comparision of SeBRe with commonly used brain registration methods.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. The publicly available datasets that are used in this study are available at brain-map.org/api/index.html and https://www.nitrc.org/frs/shownotes.php?release_id=2316. The annotated datasets that are used in this study are available at https://github.com/itsasimiqbal/SeBRe and https://bitbucket.org/theolab/.

Code availability

We provide the code for the SeBRe toolbox at https://github.com/itsasimiqbal/SeBRe and https://bitbucket.org/theolab/.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from the European Research Council (ERC, 679175, T.K.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Neural Circuit Assembly, Brain Research Institute (HiFo), UZH, Zurich, Switzerland

    Asim Iqbal & Theofanis Karayannis

  2. Neuroscience Center Zurich (ZNZ), UZH/ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Asim Iqbal & Theofanis Karayannis

  3. Department of Biology (D-BIOL), ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Romesa Khan

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  1. Asim Iqbal
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Contributions

A.I., R.K. and T.K. conceptualized the study and wrote the paper. A.I and R.K. developed the SeBRe method and performed the quantitative comparison with other registration and segmentation methods.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Theofanis Karayannis.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Iqbal, A., Khan, R. & Karayannis, T. Developing a brain atlas through deep learning. Nat Mach Intell 1, 277–287 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0058-8

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