Quantifying topological invariants of neuronal morphologies

Understand

Nervous systems are characterized by neurons displaying a diversity of morphological shapes.

• Traditionally, different shapes have been qualitatively described based on visual inspection and quantitatively described based on morphometric parameters.
• Neither process provides a solid foundation for categorizing the various morphologies, a problem that is important in many fields.
• We propose a stable topological measure as a standardized descriptor for any tree-like morphology, which encodes its skeletal branching anatomy.