Title: 3D neuron dendritic spine detection and dendrite reconstruction

Authors: Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li, Xiaobo Zhou

Addresses: Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, P.R. China. ' Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, P.R. China. ' Center for Bioinformatics, Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration and Repair, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA

Abstract: Recent research reveals that there is a close relationship between neurological functions of neuron and its morphology. As manual analysis of large datasets is too tedious and may be subjected to user bias, a computer aided processing method is urgently desired. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach for 3D dendritic spine detection and dendrite reconstruction, which can greatly help neuron-biologists to obtain morphological information about a neuron and its spines. The segmentation of dendrite and spine components is carried out by means of 3D level set based on local binary fitting model, which yields better results than global threshold method. As for spine component detection, an efficient approach is presented, which consists of backbone extraction, detached and attached spine components detection. The detection is robust to noise and the detected spines are well represented. We validate our algorithm with real 3D neuron images and the result reveals that it works well.

Keywords: dendritic spine detection; segmentation; level set; grassfire; dendrite reconstruction; neurons; morphology; local binary fitting; modelling; 3D neuron images.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAET.2009.028556

International Journal of Computer Aided Engineering and Technology, 2009 Vol.1 No.4, pp.516 - 531

Published online: 18 Sep 2009 *

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