Learning Hierarchical and Shared Features for Improving 3D Neuron Reconstruction Neuron tracing, also known as neuron reconstruction, studies 3D morphologies of neurons based on imaging data. Neuron reconstruction is of fundamental importance in computational neuroscience since it is a crucial step towards reverse engineering of the wiring and functions of a brain. On the other hand, it is not possible to manually trace all neurons due to the complexity and cost of this task. Hence, it raises the need of building a computational pipeline to perform automatic neuron reconstruction. In this work, we propose a deep learning approach for improving the accuracy of 3D neuron reconstruction. First, we propose to learn shared features among different images in the whole dataset. Such shared features are learned automatically by our model at different scales. Second, we propose to incorporate such features to guide the information flow in the network. Specifically, we propose to build skip connections between the encoder and the decoder of our networks by incorporating the hierarchical and shared features. Our proposed skip connections are built based on the attention mechanism, where the hierarchical shared features serve as the query matrix and the local input features serve as the key and value matrices. Since the parameters are learned automatically, we expect that only useful spatial information is transmitted to the decoder. We conduct both qualitative and quantitative experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Experimental results show that our proposed model has the ability to capture detailed structural information for neurons. Our results also demonstrate that the proposed model is robust to noise. In addition, quantitative evaluations show that our method achieves better performance than other approaches.

A Novel Neuron Connection Model Mimicking Human Beings Neural Networks have achieved great success in many computer vision tasks, especially in image recognition. However, as neural networks grow deeper and deeper, to some extend, weu0027ve found them becoming difficult to train, and requiring samples in large scale dramatically, even with the help of Dropout and Dropconnect methods, which do improve the accuracy a bit but burdens the training process as a sacrifice. To overcome this, we propose a novel neuron connection model to generate dynamic graphs of computation. As synapses have two kinds: excitatory and inhibitory ones, our model also has two kinds of connections for neurons. In addition, we propose a training algorithm that deals with nondifferentiable because the equations of the connections and activation function of neurons in our model are not really differentiable. To evaluate the effectiveness the proposed method, we apply it to the image recognition task, and the results show that our proposed model achieves stateoftheart performance on three public datasets: MNIST, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100.