Automated dendritic spine tracking on 2-photon microscopic images

The rapid and spontaneous morphological changes of dendritic spines have been an important observation to understand how information is stored in brain. Manual assessment of spine structure has been a useful tool to understand the differences between wild type (normal) and diseased cases. In order to perform a more through analysis, automatic tools need to be developed due to the immense amount of image data collected throughout the experiments. Additionally, dendritic spines are very dynamic structures and florescence microscopy contains high level of noise, blur and shift due to the optical properties. In this study, we track locations of dendritic spines in a full series of a time-lapse two photon microscopic images. To achieve this we propose a combined detection and tracking framework. For the detection we use a SIFT based algorithm, while the tracking requires a combination of registration and distance based spine matching. Experimental results show that this technique helps to track detected spines in time series even though the noise or blur deformed the image and complicated the detection.