Tracing low-level structures in cryo-electron tomography

Abstract

Cryo-electron tomography is an imaging technique that provides 3D images (tomograms) in situ of cells with sub-nanometer resolution. Typically, the first step in the analysis is to classify the tomogram voxels into different structures, named semantic segmentation. However, the segmentation results are sets of voxels, hindering further quantitative analysis. In this paper, we define and implement algorithms to convert the semantic segmentation of the main structures in a cellular cryo-electron tomogram (membranes, filaments, cytosolic and membrane-bound macromolecules) into specific skeletons, preserving their topological and geometrical information. Additionally, we have defined a metric for comparing segmentations in cryo-ET coming from different methods more robust than the standard DICE. We also demonstrate how this approach can be used to trace cellular features by analyzing several in situ cellular cryo-electron tomograms.