AUTHOR=Myatt Darren , Hadlington Tye , Ascoli Giorgio , Nasuto Slawomir TITLE=Neuromantic – from Semi-Manual to Semi-Automatic Reconstruction of Neuron Morphology JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroinformatics VOLUME=Volume 6 - 2012 YEAR=2012 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroinformatics/articles/10.3389/fninf.2012.00004 DOI=10.3389/fninf.2012.00004 ISSN=1662-5196 ABSTRACT=

The ability to create accurate geometric models of neuronal morphology is important for understanding the role of shape in information processing. Despite a significant amount of research on automating neuron reconstructions from image stacks obtained via microscopy, in practice most data are still collected manually. This paper describes Neuromantic, an open source system for three dimensional digital tracing of neurites. Neuromantic reconstructions are comparable in quality to those of existing commercial and freeware systems while balancing speed and accuracy of manual reconstruction. The combination of semi-automatic tracing, intuitive editing, and ability of visualizing large image stacks on standard computing platforms provides a versatile tool that can help address the reconstructions availability bottleneck. Practical considerations for reducing the computational time and space requirements of the extended algorithm are also discussed.