MICCAI 2020

2 Paper Presentation 10 DAILY Mo n d a y Erdem Varol is a postdoc scholar and Amin Nejatbakhsh is a fourth- year graduate student at Columbia University in New York City. They are presenting a series of three papers at MICCAI this year exploring brain activity in the well-studied nematode C. elegans. They speak to us ahead of their oral sessions today. C. elegans is a worm that grows to about 1mm in length and lives in the soil in many parts of the world. It is a simple organism with a nervous system and a brain that can be perturbed to explore how it behaves under different conditions. It has a very low number of neurons and parts of its brain are visible at a single neuron level , which is not possible in humans. To study this organism’s brain at such a fine resolution, you need many computer vision tools , which have been lacking until now. Erdem and Amin have developed a suite of tools to help, including atlas building, registration, segmentation, and signal extraction . Statistical Atlas of C.elegans Neurons Probabilistic Segmentation and Labeling of C. elegans Neurons Demixing Calcium Imaging Data in C. elegans via Deformable Non-negative Matrix Factorization Erdem Varol Amin Nejatbakhsh