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With the rapid increase in raw volume data sizes, such as terabyte-sized microscopy volumes, the corresponding segmentation label volumes have become extremely large as well. We focus on integer label data, whose efficient representation in memory, as well as fast random data access, pose an even greater challenge than the raw image data. Often, it is crucial to be able to rapidly identify which segments are located where, whether for empty space skipping for fast rendering, or for spatial proximity queries. We refer to this process as culling. In order to enable efficient culling of millions of labeled segments, we present a novel hybrid approach that combines deterministic and probabilistic representations of label data in a data-adaptive hierarchical data structure that we call the label list tree. In each node, we adaptively encode label data using either a probabilistic constant-time access representation for fast conservative culling, or a deterministic logarithmic-time access representation for exact queries. We choose the best data structures for representing the labels of each spatial region while building the label list tree. At run time, we further employ a novel query-adaptive culling strategy. While filtering a query down the tree, we prune it successively, and in each node adaptively select the representation that is best suited for evaluating the pruned query, depending on its size. We show an analysis of the efficiency of our approach with several large data sets from connectomics, including a brain scan with more than 13 million labeled segments, and compare our method to conventional culling approaches. Our approach achieves significant reductions in storage size as well as faster query times.

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.

This paper presents ConnectomeExplorer, an application for the interactive exploration and query-guided visual analysis of large volumetric electron microscopy (EM) data sets in connectomics research. Our system incorporates a knowledge-based query algebra that supports the interactive specification of dynamically evaluated queries, which enable neuroscientists to pose and answer domain-specific questions in an intuitive manner. Queries are built step by step in a visual query builder, building more complex queries from combinations of simpler queries. Our application is based on a scalable volume visualization framework that scales to multiple volumes of several teravoxels each, enabling the concurrent visualization and querying of the original EM volume, additional segmentation volumes, neuronal connectivity, and additional meta data comprising a variety of neuronal data attributes. We evaluate our application on a data set of roughly one terabyte of EM data and 750 GB of segmentation data, containing over 4,000 segmented structures and 1,000 synapses. We demonstrate typical use-case scenarios of our collaborators in neuroscience, where our system has enabled them to answer specific scientific questions using interactive querying and analysis on the full-size data for the first time.

Recent advances in high-resolution microscopy let neuroscientists acquire neural-tissue volume data of extremely large sizes. However, the tremendous resolution and the high complexity of neural structures present big challenges to storage, processing, and visualization at interactive rates. A proposed system provides interactive exploration of petascale (petavoxel) volumes resulting from high-throughput electron microscopy data streams. The system can concurrently handle multiple volumes and can support the simultaneous visualization of high-resolution voxel segmentation data. Its visualization-driven design restricts most computations to a small subset of the data. It employs a multiresolution virtual-memory architecture for better scalability than previous approaches and for handling incomplete data. Researchers have employed it for a 1-teravoxel mouse cortex volume, of which several hundred axons and dendrites as well as synapses have been segmented and labeled.