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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.q-bio/0408004,
title = {Characterizing neuromorphologic alterations with additive shape functionals},
author = {M. S. Barbosa and L. da F. Costa and E. S. Bernardes and G. Ramakers and J. van Pelt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:q-bio/0408004},
year = {2007}
}