Mathematical morphology: detection and characterization of directed axonal growth in vitro

Abstract

Neurite growth in vitro, neuritogenesis, is a widespread methodology in the field of developmental neurobiology. Morphological analysis of growing neurites is usually a difficult task because of their thinness and their low contrast that makes it difficult to observe clearly their shape, number, length and spatial orientation. This paper presents the use of the granulometric size distribution function to obtain, automatically, information about the shape, size and spatial orientation of growing axons in tissue cultures. The results presented show the efficiency of the granulometric size distribution for this application. The automatic detection of growing axons and the precise characterization of a relevant parameter, indicative of the axonal growth spatial orientation, was obtained by this morphological tool. The developed algorithms facilitates the analysis of these images by automatically quantifying the angle of deviation of the direction of growth, which is important given the large number of images that need to be processed for this type of study.