Understanding the diversity of eyes is crucial to unravel how different animals use vision to interact with their respective environments. To date, comparative studies of eye anatomy are scarce because they often involve time-consuming or inefficient methods. X-ray micro-tomography is a promising high-throughput imaging technique that enables to reconstruct the 3D anatomy of eyes, but powerful tools are needed to perform fast conversions of anatomical reconstructions into functional eye models. We developed a computing method named InSegtCone to automatically segment the crystalline cones in the apposition compound eyes of arthropods. Here, we describe the full auto-segmentation process, showcase its application to three different insect compound eyes and evaluate its performance. The auto-segmentation could successfully label the full individual shapes of 60%-80% of the crystalline cones, and is about as accurate and 250 times faster than manual labelling of the individual cones. We believe that InSegtCone can be an important tool for peer scientists to enable extensive comparisons of the diversity of eyes and vision in arthropods.

中文翻译：

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InSegtCone：复眼中晶体锥体的交互式分割

了解眼睛的多样性对于弄清不同动物如何利用视觉与各自环境互动至关重要。迄今为止，由于对眼解剖结构的比​​较研究通常涉及耗时或效率低下的方法，因此尚缺乏比较研究。X射线显微断层摄影术是一种有前途的高通量成像技术，能够重建眼睛的3D解剖结构，但是需要强大的工具才能将解剖结构重建快速转换为功能性眼部模型。我们开发了一种名为InSegtCone的计算方法，可以自动分割节肢动物并置眼中的视锥。在这里，我们描述了完整的自动分段过程，展示了其在三只不同的昆虫复眼中的应用并评估了其性能。自动细分可以成功标记60％-80％的整个晶体形状，与手动标记单个锥体一样，准确度和快250倍。我们认为InSegtCone可以成为同行科学家进行节肢动物眼与视多样性的广泛比较的重要工具。