Fitting Splines to Axonal Arbors Quantifies Relationship Between Branch Order and Geometry.

ABSTRACT: Neuromorphology is crucial to identifying neuronal subtypes and understanding learning. It is also implicated in neurological disease. However, standard morphological analysis focuses on macroscopic features such as branching frequency and connectivity between regions, and often neglects the internal geometry of neurons. In this work, we treat neuron trace points as a sampling of differentiable curves and fit them with a set of branching B-splines. We designed our representation with the Frenet-Serret formulas from differential geometry in mind. The Frenet-Serret formulas completely characterize smooth curves, and involve two parameters, curvature and torsion. Our representation makes it possible to compute these parameters from neuron traces in closed form. These parameters are defined co

SUBMITTER: Athey TL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8385655 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature