eLife Assessment: PointTree: Automatic and accurate reconstruction of long-range axonal projections of single-neuron
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Single-neuron axonal projections reveal the route map of neuron output and provide a key cue for understanding how information flows across the brain. Reconstruction of single-neuron axonal projections requires intensive manual operations in tens of terabytes of brain imaging data, and is highly time-consuming and labor-intensive. The main issue lies in the need for precise reconstruction algorithms to avoid reconstruction errors, yet current methods struggle with densely distributed axons, focusing mainly on skeleton extraction. To overcome this, we introduce a point assignment-based method that uses cylindrical point sets to accurately represent axons and a minimal information flow tree model to suppress the snowball effect of reconstruction errors. Our method successfully reconstructs single-neuron axonal projections across hundreds of GBs images with an average of 80% F1-score, while current methods only provide less than 40% F1-score reconstructions from a few hundred MBs images. This huge improvement is helpful for high-throughput mapping of neuron projections.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".