Title
BlastNeuron for Automated Comparison, Retrieval and Clustering of 3D Neuron Morphologies
Abstract
Characterizing the identity and types of neurons in the brain, as well as their associated function, requires a means of quantifying and comparing 3D neuron morphology. Presently, neuron comparison methods are based on statistics from neuronal morphology such as size and number of branches, which are not fully suitable for detecting local similarities and differences in the detailed structure. We developed BlastNeuron to compare neurons in terms of their global appearance, detailed arborization patterns, and topological similarity. BlastNeuron first compares and clusters 3D neuron reconstructions based on global morphology features and moment invariants, independent of their orientations, sizes, level of reconstruction and other variations. Subsequently, BlastNeuron performs local alignment between any pair of retrieved neurons via a tree-topology driven dynamic programming method. A 3D correspondence map can thus be generated at the resolution of single reconstruction nodes. We applied BlastNeuron to three datasets: (1) 10,000+ neuron reconstructions from a public morphology database, (2) 681 newly and manually reconstructed neurons, and (3) neurons reconstructions produced using several independent reconstruction methods. Our approach was able to accurately and efficiently retrieve morphologically and functionally similar neuron structures from large morphology database, identify the local common structures, and find clusters of neurons that share similarities in both morphology and molecular profiles.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1007/s12021-015-9272-7
Neuroinformatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Neuron comparison, Neuron morphology, Tree matching, Neuron reconstruction
Cluster (physics),Dynamic programming,Computer vision,Computer science,Smith–Waterman algorithm,Artificial intelligence,Invariant (mathematics),Neuron,Cluster analysis,Associated function,Machine learning
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
13
4
1559-0089
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
18
0.86
20
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yinan Wan1201.24
Fuhui Long230419.27
Lei Qu3180.86
Hang Xiao4856.37
Michael Hawrylycz514511.11
Eugene Myers63164496.92
Hanchuan Peng73930182.27