C3VFC: A Method for Tracing and Quantification of Microglia in 3D Temporal Images

Automatic glia reconstruction is essential for the dynamic analysis of microglia motility and morphology, notably so in research on neurodegenerative diseases. In this paper, we propose an automatic 3D tracing algorithm called C3VFC that uses vector field convolution to find the critical points along the centerline of an object and trace paths that traverse back to the soma of every cell in an image. The solution provides detection and labeling of multiple cells in an image over time, leading to multi-object reconstruction. The reconstruction results can be used to extract bioinformatics from temporal data in different settings. The C3VFC reconstruction results found up to a 53% improvement on the next best performing state-of-the-art tracing method. C3VFC achieved the highest accuracy scores, in relation to the baseline results, in four of the five different measures: Entire structure average, the average bi-directional entire structure average, the different structure average, and the percentage of different structures.