Abstract
In recent years, scientists have been dedicated to the research on human brain. However, the structure of human brain is too complicated, leading scientists in the search for a subject with similar functionalities but simpler structure. Therefore fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, turned out to be a good choice. Researchers tend to start with a primal organ in the olfactory system, the antenna lobe (AL), by observing the complex behaviors controlled by the system. In order to understand the effects of different odorant receptor genes, scientists control different genes and observe the change in behaviors. To analyze the data, a standard glomeruli model (glomeruli are in the AL) would be required to identify which glomeruli and neoropils are controlled by which genes. As for how to generate a glomeruli model, delineations of glomeruli are needed in order to construct the model. The segmentation method used in our work is Gradient Vector Flow (GVF) Snake. We favor its property of large capture range and less-dependency of initialization. Under these properties, we would be able to obtain a satisfying result simply by providing a circular initial contour. As for where to locate the initial contour, we’ve proposed a whole new method: we separate the glomeruli roughly by watershed algorithm. Then we calculate the center of mass for each region and use them as the center of circle for each initial contour. We are able to propose contours without manual assistance. Validation of the resultant contours would be later on evaluated by experts. From the experimental results, we may expect this algorithm to be quite contributive.