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description
Getting started with cellfinder

Tutorial

{% hint style="danger" %} Still a work in progress. The test data is not yet uploaded {% endhint %}

Although cellfinder is designed to be easy to install and use, if you're coming to it with fresh eyes, it's not always clear where to start. We provide an example brain to get you started, and also to illustrate how to play with the parameters to better suit your data.

{% hint style="warning" %} The test dataset is large (~250GB). It is recommended that you try this tutorial out on the fastest machine you have, with the fastest hard drive possible (ideally SSD) and an NVIDIA GPU. See System requirements for more details. {% endhint %}

Instructions

Setting up

  • First install cellfinder, following the Installation guide.
  • Download the data from here (it will take a long time to download).
  • Unzip the data to a directory of your choice (doesn't matter where). You should end up with a directory called test_brain with two directories, each containing 2800 images.
  • Open a terminal (Linux) or your command prompt (Windows)
  • Navigate to the directory containing the test_brain directory (e.g. using cd)
  • Activate your conda environment

{% hint style="info" %} The test data supplied is purposefully not the "best". It has some artefacts such as fluorescent vasculature, bright spots of the brain surface and stitching artefacts.

The aim of this tutorial is not to show cellfinder performing perfectly, but to illustrate how it deals with less than perfect data, and how to improve the performance. {% endhint %}

Before you start

To run cellfinder, you need to know:

  • Where your data is (in this case, it's the path to the test_brain directory)
  • Which image is the primary signal channel (the one with the labelled cells) and which is the secondary autofluorescence channel. In this case, test_brain/ch00 is the signal channel and test_brain/ch01 is the autofluroescence channel
  • Where you want to save the output data (we'll just save it into a directory called cellfinder_outputin the same directory as the test_brain)
  • The pixel sizes of your data in microns (see Specifying pixel size for details). In this case, our data is 2um per pixel in x and y (in the coronal plane) and 5um in z (the spacing of each plane).
  • The orientation of your data. For atlas registration (using brainreg) the software needs to know how you acquired your data (coronal, saggital etc.). For this cellfinder uses bg-space. Full details on how to enter your data orientation can be found here, but for this tutorial, the orientation is psl, which means that the data origin is the most posterior, superior, left voxel.
  • Which atlas you want to use (you can see which are available by running brainglobe list. In this case, we want to use a mouse atlas (as that's what our data is), and we'll use the 10um version of the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas.

Running cellfinder

cellfinder runs with a single command, with various arguments that are detailed in Command line options. To analyse the example data, the flags we need are:

  • -s The primary signal channel: test_brain/ch00
  • -b The secondary autofluorescence channel (or background): test_brain/ch01
  • -o The output directory : test_brain/output
  • -x The pixel spacing in the first dimension (left to right on a single plane in an image): 2
  • -y The pixel spacing in the second dimension (top to bottom on a single plane in an image): 2
  • -z The pixel spacing in the third dimension (the plane spacing): 5
  • --orientation The data orientation: psl
  • --atlas The atlas we want to use: allen_mouse_10um

Putting this all together into a single command gives:

cellfinder -s test_brain/ch00 -b test_brain/ch01 -o test_brain/output -x 2 -y 2 -z 5 --orientation psl --atlas allen_mouse_10um

This command will take quite a long time (anywhere from 2-10 hours) to run, depending on:

  • The speed of the disk the data is stored on
  • The CPU speed and number of cores
  • The GPU you have

If you just want to check that everything is working, we can speed everything up by:

  • Only analysing part of the brain using the flags: --start-plane 1500 --end-plane 1550
  • Using a lower-resolution atlas, using the flag: --atlas allen_mouse_25um
cellfinder -s test_brain/ch00 -b test_brain/ch01 -o test_brain/output -x 2 -y 2 -z 5 --orientation psl --atlas allen_mouse_25um --start-plane 1500 --end-plane 1550

{% hint style="warning" %} If your machine has less than 32GB of RAM, you should use the allen_mouse_25um atlas either way, as registration with the high-resolution atlas requires about 30GB for this image. {% endhint %}

Understanding the results

cellfinder runs many different steps, and saves many files for downstream analysis. By default (many of these parts can be disabled with command-line flags) the following steps will be run:

Visualising cell detection

cellfinder comes with a plugin for napari for easily visualising the results. To open napari, just run napari from your command line, and a viewer window should pop up.

Into the window, then drag and drop:

  • The signal channel directory (test_brain/ch00)
  • The entire cellfinder output directory

Visualising image registration

cellfinder uses brainreg for registration to the atlas. To check the results of this step, please see the brainreg visualisation documentation.