Morphological Study of Dendritic Spines

Abstract

Reconstruction of the neuron structure and the characterisation of dendritic spines is nowadays a hot topic in neurobiology research. Dendrites are cellular structures whose main objective is to conduct the electrochemical stimulation received from other neural cells to the cell body of the neuron from which the dendrites project. A dendritic spine is a small membranous protrusion from a neuron's dendrite that typically receives input from a single synapse of an axon. Spines have different shapes that can change over time and are believed to be closely related to learning and memory.
The main objective of this thesis is to develop an algorithm to analyse the stack of confocal microscopy images that have been previously manually processed, in order to obtain a precise three dimensional reconstruction of the dendritic spines and study their morphology.
The outline of this thesis is as follows. In the first chapter we introduce the neuronal physiological basis of the dendritic spines and their classical classification. We also briefly explain how the confocal microscope works. In the methodology chapter we expose the manual procedure to extract the dendritic spines done by the researchers of the Cortical Circuits Laboratory, the spine reconstruction algorithm that we have implemented, the 3D shape descriptors and the clustering methods that we have used. In the third chapter we show the obtained results and we end the thesis by discussing them and proposing future research lines.