Logo image
Automated Three-Dimensional Tracing of Neurons in Confocal and Brightfield Images
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Automated Three-Dimensional Tracing of Neurons in Confocal and Brightfield Images

Wenyun He, Thomas A. Hamilton, Andrew R. Cohen, Timothy J. Holmes, Christopher Pace, Donald H. Szarowski, James N. Turner and Badrinath Roysam
Microscopy and microanalysis, v 9(4), pp 296-310
Aug 2003
PMID: 12901764

Abstract

Biological Applications
Automated three-dimensional (3-D) image analysis methods are presented for tracing of dye-injected neurons imaged by fluorescence confocal microscopy and HRP-stained neurons imaged by transmitted-light brightfield microscopy. An improved algorithm for adaptive 3-D skeletonization of noisy images enables the tracing. This algorithm operates by performing connectivity testing over large N × N × N voxel neighborhoods exploiting the sparseness of the structures of interest, robust surface detection that improves upon classical vacant neighbor schemes, improved handling of process ends or tips based on shape collapse prevention, and thickness-adaptive thinning. The confocal image stacks were skeletonized directly. The brightfield stacks required 3-D deconvolution. The results of skeletonization were analyzed to extract a graph representation. Topological and metric analyses can be carried out using this representation. A semiautomatic method was developed for reconnection of dendritic fragments that are disconnected due to insufficient dye penetration, an imaging deficiency, or skeletonization errors.

Metrics

8 Record Views
71 citations in Scopus

Details

InCites Highlights

Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:

Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Materials Science, Multidisciplinary
Microscopy
Logo image