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@PHDTHESIS{Spitzer:877613,
author = {Spitzer, Hannah},
title = {{A}utomatic {A}nalysis of {C}ortical {A}reas in {W}hole
{B}rain {H}istological {S}ections using {C}onvolutional
{N}eural {N}etworks},
volume = {218},
school = {Universität Düsseldorf},
type = {Dr.},
address = {Jülich},
publisher = {Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH Zentralbibliothek, Verlag},
reportid = {FZJ-2020-02328},
isbn = {978-3-95806-469-0},
series = {Schriften des Forschungszentrums Jülich. Reihe
Schlüsseltechnologien / Key Technologies},
pages = {XII, 162 S.},
year = {2020},
note = {Universität Düsseldorf, Diss., 2020},
abstract = {The segregation of the human brain in cytoarchitectonic
areas is an important prerequisite for the allocation of
functional imaging, physiological, connectivity, molecular
and genetic data to structurally well-defined entities of
the human brain. Cytoarchitecture describes the spatial
distribution of cell bodies and their shape and size, and is
most appropriately studied at microscopic resolution based
on cell-body stained histological sections. To determine
boundaries between cytoarchitectonic areas, an
observer-independent method that uses image analysis and
multivariate statistical tools to capture changes in the
distribution of cell bodies is already established.
Nowadays, new technologies for high-throughput microscopy
allow rapid digitization of histological sections, which
increases the need for a fully automatic brain area
segmentation method. This task is extremely challenging due
to the high interindividual variability in cortical folding,
sectioning artifacts, limited labeled training data, and the
need for large input sizes for automatic methods. This work
shows that convolutional neural networks, a special class of
deep artificial neural networks, are suitable for automatic
brain area segmentation. It introduces a semantic
segmentation model that combines texture input given by
high-resolution extracts of the histological sections with
prior knowledge given by an existing probabilistic brain
area atlas, the JuBrain atlas. This atlas prior helps the
model to localize the texture input in the brain and allows
it to make topologically correct brain area predictions. To
overcome the limited amount of brain area annotations, the
model can be pre-trained on a modified task for which
training data is easier to obtain. Pre-training the model on
a self-supervised task based on predicting the spatial
distance between image patches extracted from sections of
the same brain significantly increases the segmentation
performance and enables the prediction of several brain
areas in previously unseen brains. The self-supervised model
learns a compact internal feature representation of the
input using the inherent structure of the brain, without
having explicit access to the concept of brain areas.
Extensive evaluations indicate that these features encode
cytoarchitectonic properties. This is remarkable result
which allows the data-driven analysis of the structure of
the entire brain. Although the presented model is not yet
robust enough for automatic annotation of all areas in
complete human brains, it is already leveraged for practical
use by training specialized multi-scale models to propagate
brain area labels from annotated sections to spatially close
sections. This workflow has the potential to speed up
current brain mapping projects by reducing the workload of
the neuroscientists and produces previously unattainable
high-resolution 3D views of single brain areas.},
cin = {INM-1},
cid = {I:(DE-Juel1)INM-1-20090406},
pnm = {574 - Theory, modelling and simulation (POF3-574) / HBP
SGA1 - Human Brain Project Specific Grant Agreement 1
(720270) / HBP SGA2 - Human Brain Project Specific Grant
Agreement 2 (785907)},
pid = {G:(DE-HGF)POF3-574 / G:(EU-Grant)720270 /
G:(EU-Grant)785907},
typ = {PUB:(DE-HGF)3 / PUB:(DE-HGF)11},
urn = {urn:nbn:de:0001-2020072216},
url = {https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/877613},
}