🤖 AI Summary
SkNeXt通过首先将神经元形态转换为紧凑的SWC骨架，然后基于这些骨架进行高分辨率重建，解决了从PB级显微图像数据中高效重构神经元的问题。
📝 Abstract
Recent advances in high-resolution fluorescence and electron microscopy have enabled nanoscale imaging across increasingly large brain volumes, but the resulting terabyte- to petabyte-scale datasets make complete neuronal reconstruction prohibitively expensive in computation, data movement, and manual proofreading. Here, we present SkNeXt, a topology-first framework for scalable neuronal reconstruction from large volumetric microscopy datasets. Instead of densely processing entire image volumes, SkNeXt first converts neuronal morphology into compact SWC skeletons that preserve long-range connectivity. Proofreading is therefore focused on sparse neuronal trees, allowing branch, continuity, and connectivity errors to be corrected before high-resolution reconstruction. The corrected skeletons then serve as persistent structural priors for recovering detailed morphology while preserving neuronal identity and topology. Crucially, SkNeXt also uses neuronal skeletons as spatial indices for selective data access, retrieving high-resolution image regions only along reconstructed trajectories and bypassing most background and signal-free volumes. This substantially reduces I/O and computational overhead, allowing reconstruction cost to scale with neuronal morphology rather than total dataset size. Using SkNeXt, we reconstructed neurons from a petabyte-scale super-resolution fluorescence dataset of the mouse brain on a single GPU within one week, without requiring exhaustive dense inference across the complete imaging volume.