Cellular cartography of the organ of Corti based on optical tissue clearing and machine learning

摘要: The highly organized spatial arrangement of sensory hair cells in the organ Corti is essential for inner ear function. Here, we report a new analytical pipeline, based on optical clearing tissue, construction single-cell resolution map Corti. A sorbitol-based method enabled imaging entire cochlea at subcellular resolution. High-fidelity detection and analysis all cell positions along longitudinal axis were performed automatically by machine learning-based pattern recognition. Application this to samples from young, adult, noise-exposed mice extracted information regarding cellular pathology, including radial characteristics loss, implying that multiple mechanisms underlie clustered loss. Our mapping effective system-level phenotyping under both physiological pathological conditions.