Characterizing neuromorphologic alterations with additive shape functionals

Abstract

The complexity of a neuronal cell shape is known to be related to its function. Specifically, among other indicators, a decreased complexity in the dendritic trees of cortical pyramidal neurons has been associated with mental retardation. In this paper we develop a procedure to address the characterization of morphological changes induced in cultured neurons by over-expressing a gene involved in mental retardation. Measures associated with the multiscale connectivity, an additive image functional, are found to give a reasonable separation criterion between two categories of cells. One category consists of a control group and two transfected groups of neurons, and the other, a class of cat ganglionary cells. The reported framework also identified a trend towards lower complexity in one of the transfected groups. Such results establish the suggested measures as an effective descriptors of cell shape.

Simulation of motoneuron morphology in three dimensions. I. Building individual dendritic trees

“…The development of quantitative models that accurately reflect the available data forces the investigator to search for relations that are hidden in the existing information and guides the design of experiments to produce new information (Burke et al, 1992;van Pelt and Uylings, 1999;Ascoli et al, 2001a;Burke and Marks, 2002). A truly parsimonious quantitative model that mimics the statistical properties of a given class of neurons in a given state (e.g., "normal"), when applied to the same class of cells under other conditions (e.g., after trauma or in degenerative disorders), should reveal in what ways the morphologies in the two states differ (e.g., Barbosa et al, 2004).…”

The Tree-Edit-Distance, a Measure for Quantifying Neuronal Morphology

“…The results show that the edit-distances based on such labels can discriminate quite well between shapes of different three-dimensional distribution. There are other recently reported methodologies including the excluded volume (da Costa et al 2005), the Minkowski functionals (Barbosa et al 2004) or the percolation critical density (da Costa and Manoel 2003), that put special emphasis on the spatial distribution. They have been found to be effective means for expressing different aspects of spatial distribution in the case of twodimensional representation of cells.…”

Integral-geometry characterization of photobiomodulation effects on retinal vessel morphology

“…Observing how all additive functionals changes, as the object shape is varied in a controlled fashion, produces a morphological signature that characterizes the object shape, its spatial neighborhood and the process instigating the change in its shape. This framework has been used to perform analysis, classification and inference in a range of applications from material sciences [7,8], physics of polymers and statistical physics [9][10][11][12][13], to quantitative morphological classification of neuronal cell types [14][15][16].…”