Contact Site Extraction

Contact sites are extracted from an existing segmentation. The main functionality is in syconn.extraction.cs_extraction_steps and syconn.extraction.cs_processing_steps.

The exection script is located at SyConn/scrips/syns/syn_gen.py.

It consists of two steps: (1) Finding and extracting contact sites between supervoxels and (2) combining the contact sites between supersegmentation objects. These steps have some similarity with the object extraction and they share some functionality. The main difference is that for objects (eg. mitochondria) the extent is known at extraction time, meaning that they are not split up into smaller fragments that have to be assembled later on, as is the case for supervoxels and super-supervoxels, because an oversegmentation is necessary in these cases.

Prerequisites

• Knossos- and SegmentationDataset of the supervoxel segmentation

• SuperSegmentationDataset containg the cell reconstructions (SV-agglomeration/RAG)

• KnossosDataset of symmetric, asymmetric and SJ predictions (WIP)

Finding Contact Sites

TODO: this needs to be adapted to the new extraction procedure

Contact sites are detected from a segmentation stored in knossos overlaycubes and saved to a chunk dataset (see chunk_prediction for details on how to create chunk datasets). This combines all contact sites between two supervoxels into a single object. combine_and_split_cs_agg splits these apart later, based on connected components. The first step reads from a KNOSSOS dataset with the segmentation and saves the extracted contact sites into an hdf5 chunk dataset.

from syconn.extraction import cs_extraction_steps as ces
ces.find_contact_sites(cset, knossos_path)

The second step used the hdf5 chunk dataset and generates a segmentation dataset with the results.

from syconn.extraction import cs_extraction_steps as ces
ces.extract_agg_contact_sites(cset, working_dir,
                              n_folders_fs=10000, suffix=""

Next, the resulting contact sites are overlapped with synaptic junction objects (SJ) using the previous CS ChunkDataset, which will create a SegmentationDataset of ‘syn’ objects:

from syconn.extraction import cs_processing_steps as cps
cps.syn_gen_via_cset(working_dir)

This creates a new SegmentationDataset of type synn. These are contact site objects that overlapped at least with one voxel with a synaptic junction SegmentationObject.

Aggregating Contact Sites

To agglomerate ‘syn’ objects, the SV-agglomeration i.e. SSVs are required. Based on their region-adjacency graph SV-wise ‘syn’ objects are agglomerated to ‘syn_ssv’ objects, stored in a SegmentationDataset.

from syconn.extraction import cs_processing_steps as cps
cps.combine_and_split_cs_agg(working_dir)

It combines contact sites between the same supersupervoxels and splits them based on a maximal voxel distance of cs_gap_nm which can be specified in syconn/config/global_params.py.