3BTRON: A Blood-Brain Barrier Recognition Network
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The blood-brain barrier (BBB) plays a crucial role in maintaining brain homeostasis. During ageing, the BBB undergoes structural alterations. Electron microscopy (EM) is the gold standard for studying the structural alterations of the brain vasculature. However, analysis of EM images is time-intensive and can be prone to selection bias, limiting our understanding of the structural effect of ageing on the BBB. Here, we introduce 3BTRON, a deep learning framework for the automated analysis of electron microscopy images of the BBB. Using age as a readout, we trained and validated our model on a unique dataset (n = 359). We show that the proposed model could confidently identify the BBB of aged mouse brains from young mouse brains across three different brain regions, achieving a sensitivity of 77.8% and specificity of 80.0% post-stratification when predicting on unseen data. Additionally, feature importance methods revealed the spatial features of each image that contributed most to the predictions. These findings demonstrate a new data-driven approach to analysing age-related changes in the architecture of the BBB.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".