Recent studies have supported the relation between mitochondrial functions and degenerative disorders related to ageing, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Since these studies have exposed the need for detailed and high-resolution analysis of physical alterations in mitochondria, it is necessary to be able to perform segmentation and 3D reconstruction of mitochondria. However, due to the variety of mitochondrial structures, automated mitochondria segmentation and reconstruction in electron microscopy (EM) images have proven to be a difficult and challenging task. This paper puts forward an effective and automated pipeline based on deep learning to realize mitochondria segmentation in different EM images. The proposed pipeline consists of three parts: (1) utilizing image registration and histogram equalization as image pre-processing steps to maintain the consistency of the dataset; (2) proposing an effective approach for 3D mitochondria segmentation based on a volumetric, residual convolutional and deeply supervised network; and (3) employing a 3D connection method to obtain the relationship of mitochondria and displaying the 3D reconstruction results. To our knowledge, we are the first researchers to utilize a 3D fully residual convolutional network with a deeply supervised strategy to improve the accuracy of mitochondria segmentation. The experimental results on anisotropic and isotropic EM volumes demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and the Jaccard index of our segmentation (91.8% in anisotropy, 90.0% in isotropy) and F1 score of detection (92.2% in anisotropy, 90.9% in isotropy) suggest that our approach achieved state-of-the-art results. Our fully automated pipeline contributes to the development of neuroscience by providing neurologists with a rapid approach for obtaining rich mitochondria statistics and helping them elucidate the mechanism and function of mitochondria.

The structural information detection of road conditions, which is adopted for improving driving comfort, patrol inspection, road maintenance, and accident rescue. In order to improve the trustworthiness of road condition detection, a real-time artificial intelligence road detection system based on binocular vision sensors is investigated in this article. The system is deployed on the low-power edge computing platform, which can upload the processing results to the cloud through the Internet-of-Things devices. The authors use binocular disparity information and image-based lightweight deep segmentation network to enhance the detection robustness and accuracy in the industrial Internet-of-Things application scenarios. Considering the small training dataset, a special data labeling regularization and training strategy have also been proposed for training this network. In addition, we employ multiframes feature matching and measurement data filtering to enhance the measurement accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that our monocular–binocular fusion framework is robust and efficient.

Together, mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) occupy more than 20% of a cell's volume, and morphological abnormality may lead to cellular function disorders. With the rapid development of large-scale electron microscopy (EM), manual contouring and three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of these organelles has previously been accomplished in biological studies. However, manual segmentation of mitochondria and ER from EM images is time consuming and thus unable to meet the demands of large data analysis. Here, we propose an automated pipeline for mitochondrial and ER reconstruction, including the mitochondrial and ER contact sites (MAMs). We propose a novel recurrent neural network to detect and segment mitochondria and a fully residual convolutional network to reconstruct the ER. Based on the sparse distribution of synapses, we use mitochondrial context information to rectify the local misleading results and obtain 3D mitochondrial reconstructions. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the quantification of mitochondria and synapses is of great significance to understand the function of biological nervous systems. Electron microscopy (EM), with the necessary resolution in three directions, is the only available imaging method to look closely into these issues. Therefore, estimating the number of mitochondria and synapses from the serial EM images is coming into prominence. Since previous studies have achieved preferable 2D segmentation performance, it holds great promise to obtain the 3D connection relationship from the 2D segmentation results. In this paper, we improve upon Matlab’s function bwconncomp and propose a fast forward 3D connection algorithm for mitochondria and synapse segmentations from serial EM images. To benchmark the performance of the proposed method, two EM datasets with the annotated ground truth are produced for mitochondria and synapses, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve the preferable connection performance that closely matches the ground truth. Moreover, it greatly reduces the computational burden and alleviates the memory requirements compared with the function bwconncomp. The proposed method can be deemed as an effective strategy to obtain the 3D connection relationship from serial mitochondria and synapse segmentations. It is helpful to accurately and quickly quantify the statistics of the numbers, volumes, surface areas, and lengths, which will greatly facilitate the data analysis of neurobiology research.