Distribution of synaptic vesicles

Abstract

Vesicles store neurotransmitters that are released at the synapse for chemical communication between nerve cells. We have analyzed the statistical nature of synaptic vesicle’s location in serial section transmission electron microscope images of rat's brains during stress and sham-stress treatment. Serial section transmission electron microscope imaging poses a particular challenge, since the images have to be reassembled after sectioning in order to study positions in 3 dimensions, and since uncertainty on location is heavily skewed due to uncertainty about the section thickness and due the transmission process, which results in a projection. We propose methods for estimating the thickness of sections by image statistics alone and for fitting parametrized densities in the case of projection.

Biography

Jon Sporring received his Master and Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark in 1995 and 1998, respectively. Part of his Ph.D. program was carried out at IBM Research Center, Almaden, California, USA. Following his Ph.D, he worked as a visiting researcher at the Computer Vision and Robotics Lab at Foundation for Research & Technology - Hellas, Greece, and as assistant research professor at 3D-Lab, School of Dentistry, University of Copenhagen. Since 2003 he has been employed as associate professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen. From 2008-2009 he was part-time Senior Researcher at Nordic Bioscience a/s. In the period 2007-2012 he was Vice-Chair for Research at Department of Computer Science, and in 2012-2013 he was a visiting professor at School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. His main topics of research are mathematical and medical image processing.