We are working on several projects which have in common the reconstruction of smooth surfaces based on data gathered using optical sections. Data collection is done using a great many techniques - most of which require manual tracing or labelling by a human trained observer. These include: camera lucida drawings or EM photomicrographs traced on a digitizing tablet, and contours traced directly on a frame-grabbed image. Optical sections are acquired using both confocal microscopy and Nomarski optics. Objects of interest range from individual cells (photoreceptors, ganglion cells), through small collections of cells, to extended regions. Some of the objects are fairly simple (e.g., individual cones in human retina, blob- or sheet-like regions of interest); the information is contained in precise measurements of the geometry. Other objects (e.g., dendritic trees) are more complicated, with most of the information contained in the shape of a branching structure. All of these types of data are processed into common representation which produces as its final product a smooth 3-D surface, with arbitrary branching structure. Common tasks such as filtering hand drawn features, automatic alignment of multiple 2-D sections to create a 3-D volume, surface reconstruction, display and analysis are supported.
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