Ultrastructural Analysis of Mitochondria and Neurons in the Ventral Nerve Cord

Built transformer-based instance segmentation pipelines for petabyte-scale SEM volumes to analyze neuronal and mitochondrial structures in the Macleod Lab.

← Home

Transformer-based segmentation enabled large-scale 3D mapping of mitochondria within Drosophila motor neurons.

To address the challenge of analyzing mitochondrial morphology and distribution across the vast and complex architecture of neurons, I developed automated segmentation pipelines for petabyte-scale SBF-SEM datasets. This figure demonstrates our ability to reconstruct an entire Drosophila motor neuron (blue) along with every individual mitochondrion (various colors), capturing both the intricate neuronal arborization and the diverse mitochondrial populations within it. This advance allows our lab to systematically quantify mitochondrial organization across neuron types at high resolution, providing a platform for investigating how neuronal energy demands are met at the subcellular level.

Contributions

Led analysis of petabyte-scale 3D SEM imaging data using transformer models to study neuronal and mitochondrial energy demands.
Built an instance segmentation pipeline for Drosophila VNC neurons and mitochondria.
Adapted Flood Filling Networks with vision transformers (SAM2) to reconstruct branching and mitochondrial networks.
Coordinated a crowdsourcing initiative engaging thousands to generate consensus training datasets.
Analyzed mitochondrial distribution and morphology across motor neurons.