Semiautomatic Entry of Neuron Trees from the Microscope

Chapter 1 introduced the concept of neuron tracing as a method of transferring a neuron from its original form in the tissue to a different form—either a drawing on a sheet of paper or a physical model. Although these new forms help to overcome some of the viewing constraints of the microscope, they still are not “tractable”; that is, they are still difficult to work with mathematically. If you wish to do a statistical summarization of the neuron, for example to plot its dendritic length versus thickness, you must make tedious measurements of the drawing or model to gather the data for the graph. To alleviate this problem, the neuron should be transferred (Fig. 4-1) to a computer memory. Once stored there, a computer program can work with the structure to build three-dimensional displays and plots and to generate statistical summaries of the neurons with far less effort than you could as a human.