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Archetypes and Outliers in the Neuromorphological Space

Cesar H. Comin (ORCID), Julian Tejada, Matheus P. Viana, Antonio C. Roque, Luciano Da F. Costa

The Computing Dendrite, 11: 41-59. . DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-8094-5_3.

Abstract

Neuromorphology has a long history of meticulous analysis and fundamental studies about the intricacies of neuronal shape. These studies converged to a plethora of information describing in detail many neuronal characteristics, as well as comprehensive data about cell localization, animal type, age, among others. Much of this information has notably been compiled through efforts of the Computational Neuroanatomy Group at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University, thus originating the NeuroMorpho.org repository, a resource that incorporates a large set of data and related tools. In the current work we present a methodology that can be used to search for novel relationships in cell morphology contained in databases such as the NeuroMorpho.org. More specifically, we try to understand which morphological characteristics can be considered universal for a given cell type, or to what extent we can represent an entire cell class through an archetypal shape. This analysis is done by taking a large number of characteristics from cells into account, and then applying multivariate techniques to analyze the data. The neurons are then classified as archetypes or outliers according to how close they are to the typical shape of the class. We find that granule and medium spiny neurons can be associated with a typical shape, and that different animals and brain regions show distinct distributions of shapes.

Citation

@article{Comin2014Archetypes,
  title   = {Archetypes and Outliers in the Neuromorphological Space},
  author  = {Comin, Cesar H. and Tejada, Julian and Viana, Matheus P. and Roque, Antonio C. and Costa, Luciano Da F.},
  journal = {The Computing Dendrite},
  year    = {2014},
  volume  = {11},
  number  = {},
  pages   = {41--59},
  doi     = {10.1007/978-1-4614-8094-5_3}
}