Tool for Digital Reconstruction of Neuronal Arborizations From Image Stacks

Digital reconstruction of neuronal arboriza- tions is an important step in the quantitative investigation of cellular neuroanatomy. In this process, neurites imaged by microscopy are semi-manually traced through the use of spe- cialized computer software and represented as binary trees of branching cylinders (or truncated cones). Such form of the reconstruction files is efficient and parsimonious, and allows exten- sive morphometric analysis as well as the implementation of biophysical models of electrophysiology. Here, we describe Neuron_ Morpho, a plugin for the popular Java appli- cation ImageJ that mediates the digital reconstruction of neurons from image stacks. Both the executable and code of Neuron_ Morpho are freely distributed (www.maths. soton.ac.uk/staff/D'Alessandro/morpho or