Neurondynamics: A method for neurotransmitter vesicle movement characterization in neurons

Abstract

Automated tracking of axonal neurotransmitter vesicles is a challenging problem in neuroscience. The present vesicle tracking is typically performed manually over confocal microscopy images. Neuron Dynamics is a method designed to automate and speed-up the characterization of global vesicle movement in neurons while yielding high accuracy and precision results (similar or better than expert clinicians). For a set of fluorescent-marked vesicles "films", Neuron-Dynamics performs a two stage approach: 1) Training: the system asks the user to mark a set of vesicles and the position of the cellular body; 2) Detection & tracking: based on the previous training, the system runs a Bayesian classifier over the image sequence to detect and classify vesicles and their movements (speed and direction). The obtained results were compared to another state-of-the-art method (FluoTracker), and were found greatly higher in accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and precision. Although Neuron Dynamics is a semi-automated process, it is significantly faster than manual tracking and can be adapted to be used for similar approaches for other biological samples. © 2014 IEEE.