Jo Maniscalco & Adrià Casamitjana – CMIC/WEISS joint seminar series

Speaker:  Jo Maniscalco / In2scienceUK Talk

Abstract: In2scienceUK is a charity that improves access to STEM careers for young people from low-income and under-represented backgrounds. They do this by offering a summer programme delivered in collaboration with volunteers from STEM professions, which includes:

· Online mentoring and one day work shadowing with a STEM professional (Covid-19 restrictions permitting) 

· Online research courses with reading, writing and investigative tasks 

· Skills, careers and employability workshops 

We'll be joined by Jo Maniscalco, Placement and Volunteer Coordinator at In2scienceUK. She is both an In2scienceUK and UCL alumnus, and is excited to talk more about how you can get involved in the programme this summer.

Speaker: Adrià Casamitjana

Title: Robust 3D histology reconstruction of multiple contrasts

Abstract:  3D histology reconstruction finds application in areas such as atlas building and validation of in vivo imaging. Straightforward reconstruction via pairwise registration of neighbouring sections presents well-known problems such as banana effect and z-shift error propagation. While these can be mitigated using a linearly aligned external reference, registration is often inaccurate due to contrast differences and strong non-linear distortions from the processing pipeline of histology tissue. We present a probabilistic model of spatial deformation that yields reconstructions for multiple histological stains that are jointly smooth, robust to outliers and recovers the original shape. Quantitative results show the benefits of the framework, and we use data from the Allen human brain atlas to validate the method in a real case scenario.