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Characterizing neuromorphologic alterations with additive shape functionals

M. S. Barbosa·L. da F. Costa·E. S. Bernardes·G. Ramakers·J. van Pelt
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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.

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M. S. Barbosa, L. da F. Costa, E. S. Bernardes, G. Ramakers, J. van Pelt. 2004-08-09. Characterizing neuromorphologic alterations with additive shape functionals. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb%2Fe2004-00035-y

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