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Quantitative 3-D morphometric analysis of individual dendritic spines
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Quantitative 3-D morphometric analysis of individual dendritic spines

Subhadip Basu, Punam Kumar Saha, Matylda Roszkowska, Marta Magnowska, Ewa Baczynska, Nirmal Das, Dariusz Plewczynski and Jakub Wlodarczyk
Scientific reports, Vol.8(1), 3545
02/23/2018
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-21753-8
PMCID: PMC5825014
PMID: 29476060
url
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-21753-8View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

The observation and analysis of dendritic spines morphological changes poses a major challenge in neuroscience studies. The alterations of their density and/or morphology are indicators of the cellular processes involved in neural plasticity underlying learning and memory, and are symptomatic in neuropsychiatric disorders. Despite ongoing intense investigations in imaging approaches, the relationship between changes in spine morphology and synaptic function is still unknown. The existing quantitative analyses are difficult to perform and require extensive user intervention. Here, we propose a new method for (1) the three-dimensional (3-D) segmentation of dendritic spines using a multi-scale opening approach and (2) define 3-D morphological attributes of individual spines for the effective assessment of their structural plasticity. The method was validated using confocal light microscopy images of dendritic spines from dissociated hippocampal cultures and brain slices (1) to evaluate accuracy relative to manually labeled ground-truth annotations and relative to the state-of-the-art Imaris tool, (2) to analyze reproducibility of user-independence of the segmentation method, and (3) to quantitatively analyze morphological changes in individual spines before and after chemically induced long-term potentiation. The method was monitored and used to precisely describe the morphology of individual spines in real-time using consecutive images of the same dendritic fragment.

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