Eur. Phys. J. B 37, 109-115 (2004)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2004-00035-y

Characterizing neuromorphologic alterations with additive shape functionals

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

Corresponding author: ^a marconi@if.sc.usp.br

Received: 31 July 2003
Revised: 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.