Growing axons analysis by using Granulometric Size distribution

GONZALEZ MA; BALLARIN VL; RAPACIOLI M; RODRÍGUEZ CELÍN A; SANCHEZ V; FLORES V

Journal of Physics: Conference Series

IOP Publishing

Año: 2011 vol. 313 p. 12006 - 12014

1742-6588

Neurite growth (neuritogenesis) in vitro is a common methodology in the field of developmental neurobiology. Morphological analyses of growing neurites are usually difficult because their thinness and low contrast usually prevent to observe clearly their shape, number, length and spatial orientation. This paper presents the use of the granulometric size distribution in order to automatically obtain information about the shape, size and spatial orientation of growing axons in tissue cultures. The results here presented show that the granulometric size distribution results in a very useful morphological tool since it allows the automatic detection of growing axons and the precise characterization of a relevant parameter indicative of the axonal growth spatial orientation such as the quantification of the angle of deviation of the growing direction. The developed algorithms automatically quantify this orientation by facilitating the analysis of these images, which is important given the large number of images that need to be processed for this type of study.