February Fourier Talks 2011

Computational Neuroscience is a rapidly emerging field of biology. The recent advances in this field can be attributed to the development of lower cost confocal microscopes and various fluorescent agents including some that are completely natural to neurons. These new techniques require the use of advanced computational tools for the processing of large 3D-volumes of data and the extraction of relevant information. The goal of this effort is to construct electronic 3D-maps of neurons which will look like Google's body browser which will facilitate models of neuronal activation and communication between neurons. To this date this project is still in its infancy. In our talk we will discuss some aspects of the image analysis of raw 3d-data volumes and of the construction of synthetic data volumes. This talk presents joint work with I.A. Kakadiaris, D. Labate, P-H. Herrera, D. Jimenez. L. Fernanda and P. Saggau are our collaborators who are responsible for the acquisition of the data and also are the end-users of our work and guide us with their expertise in Neuroscience.