Segmentation of Tau Stained Alzheimers Brain Tissue Using Convolutional Neural Networks.

Alzheimers disease is characterized by complex changes in brain tissue including the accumulation of tau-containing neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) and dystrophic neurites (DNs) within neurons. The distribution and density of tau pathology throughout the brain is evaluated at autopsy as one component of Alzheimers disease diagnosis. Deep neural networks (DNN) have been shown to be effective in the quantification of tau pathology when trained on fully annotated images.