Online three-dimensional dendritic spines mophological classification based on semi-supervised learning

Recent studies on neuron imaging show that there is a strong relationship between the functional properties of a neuron and its morphology, especially its dendritic spine structures. However, most of the current methods for morphological spine classification only concern features in two-dimensional (2D) space, which consequently decreases the accuracy of dendritic spine analysis. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework, in which spine phenotypes in three-dimensional (3D) space are considered. With training only on a few pre-classified inputs, the rest of the spines can be identified effectively. We also derived a new scheme using an affinity matrix between features to further improve the accuracy. Our experimental results indicate that a small training dataset is sufficient to classify detected dendritic spines.