IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2018 Jan;24(1):853-861. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2017.2744278. Epub 2017 Aug 29.
This paper presents Abstractocyte, a system for the visual analysis of astrocytes and their relation to neurons, in nanoscale volumes of brain tissue. Astrocytes are glial cells, i.e., non-neuronal cells that support neurons and the nervous system. The study of astrocytes has immense potential for understanding brain function. However, their complex and widely-branching structure requires high-resolution electron microscopy imaging and makes visualization and analysis challenging. Furthermore, the structure and function of astrocytes is very different from neurons, and therefore requires the development of new visualization and analysis tools. With Abstractocyte, biologists can explore the morphology of astrocytes using various visual abstraction levels, while simultaneously analyzing neighboring neurons and their connectivity. We define a novel, conceptual 2D abstraction space for jointly visualizing astrocytes and neurons. Neuroscientists can choose a specific joint visualization as a point in this space. Interactively moving this point allows them to smoothly transition between different abstraction levels in an intuitive manner. In contrast to simply switching between different visualizations, this preserves the visual context and correlations throughout the transition. Users can smoothly navigate from concrete, highly-detailed 3D views to simplified and abstracted 2D views. In addition to investigating astrocytes, neurons, and their relationships, we enable the interactive analysis of the distribution of glycogen, which is of high importance to neuroscientists. We describe the design of Abstractocyte, and present three case studies in which neuroscientists have successfully used our system to assess astrocytic coverage of synapses, glycogen distribution in relation to synapses, and astrocytic-mitochondria coverage.
本文提出了 Abstractocyte，这是一个用于可视化分析星形胶质细胞及其与神经元关系的系统，适用于纳米尺度的脑组织体积。星形胶质细胞是神经胶质细胞，即支持神经元和神经系统的非神经元细胞。研究星形胶质细胞对于理解大脑功能具有巨大的潜力。然而，它们复杂且广泛分支的结构需要高分辨率电子显微镜成像，这使得可视化和分析具有挑战性。此外，星形胶质细胞的结构和功能与神经元非常不同，因此需要开发新的可视化和分析工具。有了 Abstractocyte，生物学家可以使用各种视觉抽象级别来探索星形胶质细胞的形态，同时分析相邻的神经元及其连接。我们定义了一个新颖的、概念性的 2D 抽象空间，用于联合可视化星形胶质细胞和神经元。神经科学家可以选择这个空间中的一个特定的联合可视化作为一个点。交互式地移动这个点可以让他们以直观的方式在不同的抽象级别之间平滑过渡。与简单地在不同的可视化之间切换相比，这在整个过渡过程中保留了视觉上下文和相关性。用户可以从具体的、高度详细的 3D 视图平滑地过渡到简化和抽象的 2D 视图。除了研究星形胶质细胞、神经元及其关系外，我们还支持对糖原分布的交互式分析，这对神经科学家非常重要。我们描述了 Abstractocyte 的设计，并介绍了三个案例研究，神经科学家成功地使用我们的系统评估了突触处的星形胶质细胞覆盖、与突触相关的糖原分布以及星形胶质细胞-线粒体的覆盖。
