Eur. Phys. J. B 37, 109-115
(2004) DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2004-00035-y
Characterizing neuromorphologic alterations with additive
shape functionals
M.S. Barbosa1, L. da F.
Costa1, E.S. Bernardes2, G.
Ramakers3 and J. van Pelt3
1 Cybernetic Vision Research
Group, GII-IFSC, Universidade de São Paulo, São Carlos, SP,
Caixa Postal 369, 13560-970, Brasil 2
DFCM-IFSC, Universidade de São Paulo, São Carlos, SP, Caixa
Postal 369, 13560-970, Brasil 3 Neurons
and Network, Netherlands Institute of Brain Research,
Meibergdreef 33, 1105 AZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands marconi@if.sc.usp.br
(Received
31 July 2003 / Received in final form 10 November 2003 /
Published online 19 February 2004)
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.
PACS 87.80.Pa - Morphometry and stereology.
87.19.La - Neuroscience.