Head and Tail Localization of C. elegans
This work addresses a specific task for neuroscience researchers studying C. elegans behavior, but it is incremental as it applies existing neural network methods to a known problem.
The authors tackled the problem of localizing the head and tail of C. elegans in images for behavioral analysis, using a neural network-based approach, and made their code publicly available to promote reproducibility.
C. elegans is commonly used in neuroscience for behaviour analysis because of it's compact nervous system with well-described connectivity. Localizing the animal and distinguishing between its head and tail are important tasks to track the worm during behavioural assays and to perform quantitative analyses. We demonstrate a neural network based approach to localize both the head and the tail of the worm in an image. To make empirical results in the paper reproducible and promote open source machine learning based solutions for C. elegans behavioural analysis, we also make our code publicly available.