The Research Center "E. Piaggio" is going to open a study scholarship for graduate master students in Computer, Biomedical or Bionics Engineering.
The topic of the scholarship will be the analysis of neuron morphology from microscopy.
The final objective is to accurately quantify neuronal morphology at tissue and molecular levels through the development of intelligent segmentation-based image processing algorithms. Specifically, this activity will build the necessary background to improve an algorithm to isolate single neurons or smaller neuronal structures from 3D datasets representing the intricacies of the brain micro-structure. Researchers at Centro Piaggio have implemented a novel segmentation algorithm (known as SmRG or Smart Region Growing algorithm) that represents an extension of a region growing procedure. Specifically, its homogeneity predicate is based on a statistical model of image signal and noise, that can be estimated locally, and results in the probability of a pixel to belong to the object to be segmented (e.g., a neuron). Specifically, a mixture model is estimated through an expectation maximization approach. The activity will be developed undet the FLAG-ERA Human Brain project SENSEI
Student Scholarship Goals: the candidate should study the procedures to characterize the statistical properties of microscopy images with the aim of improving the generalizability of the current segmentation algorithm to different image modalities (STED, STORM/PAINT, 3D SOFI) and protocols (CLARITY, MemBright, immuno-labelling).
Besides knowledge on statistical signal and image processing, programming skills in matlab environment is are required. Knowledge about other programming languages (e.g. Python) are appreciated.
The proposed scholarship will have an expected duration of six months, and is likely to start on April/May 2021.
For further information, please contact Nicola Vanello (Nicola.vanello@unipi.it.), Arti Ahluwalia (arti.ahluwalia@unipi.it) and Chiara Magliaro (chiara.magliaro@centropiaggio.unipi.it)