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Marconi Soares Barbosa

Publications and source records attributed to Marconi Soares Barbosa.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

Morphological relationship between axon and dendritic arborizations as revealed by Minkowski functionals

The spatial structure of the axonal and dendritic arborizations is closely related to the functionality of specific neurons or neuronal subsystems. The present work describes how multiscale Minkowski functionals can be used in order to characterize and compare the spatial organization of these two types of arborizations. The discrimination potential of the method is illustrated with respect to three classes of cortical neurons.

q-bio.QM↗

Comparative analysis of protein structure using multiscale additive functionals

This work reports a new methodology aimed at describing characteristics of protein structural shapes, and suggests a framework in which to resolve or classify automatically such structures into known families. This new approach to protein structure characterization is based on elements of integral geometry using biologically relevant measurements of shape and considering them on a multi-scale representation which align the proposed methodology to the recently reported "tube picture" of a protein structure as a minimal representation model. The method has been applied with good results to a subset of protein structures known to be especially challenging to revert into families, confirming the potential of the proposed method for accurate structure classification.

q-bio.QM↗

Active percolation analysis of pyramidal neurons of somatosensory cortex: A comparison of wildtype and p21H-ras^Val12 transgenic mice

This article describes the investigation of morphological variations among two set of neuronal cells, namely a control group of wild type rat cells and a group of cells of a trangenic line. Special attention is given to sigular points in the neuronal structure, namely the branching points and extremities of the dendritic processes. The characterization of the spatial distribution of such points is obtained by using a recently reported morphological technique based on forced percolation and window-size compensation, which is particularly suited to the analysis of scattered points presenting several coexisting densities. Different dispersions were identified in our statistical analysis, suggesting that the transgenic line of neurons is characterized by a more pronounced morphological variation. A classification scheme based on a canonical discriminant function was also considered in order to identify the morphological differences.

q-bio.NC↗

An Analytical Approach to Connectivity in Regular Neuronal Networks

This paper describes how realistic neuromorphic networks can have their connectivity fully characterized in analytical fashion. By assuming that all neurons have the same shape and are regularly distributed along the two-dimensional orthogonal lattice with parameter $Δ$, it is possible to obtain the exact number of connections and cycles of any length from the autoconvolution function as well as from the respective spectral density derived from the adjacency matrix. It is shown that neuronal shape plays an important role in defining the spatial distribution of synapses in neuronal networks. In addition, we observe that neuromorphic networks typically exhibit an interesting phenomenon where the pattern of connections is progressively shifted along the spatial domain for increasing connection lengths. This is a consequence of the fact that in neurons the axon reference point usually does not coincide with the cell centre of mass. Morphological measurements for characterization of the spatial distribution of connections, including the adjacency matrix spectral density and the lacunarity of the connections, are suggested and illustrated. We also show that Hopfield networks with connectivity defined by different neuronal morphologies, quantified by the proposed analytical approach, lead to distinct performace for associative recall, as measured by the overlap index. The potential of the proposed approach is illustrated with respect to digital images of real neuronal cells.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

Neuromorphometric characterization with shape functionals

This work presents a procedure to extract morphological information from neuronal cells based on the variation of shape functionals as the cell geometry undergoes a dilation through a wide interval of spatial scales. The targeted shapes are alpha and beta cat retinal ganglion cells, which are characterized by different ranges of dendritic field diameter. Image functionals are expected to act as descriptors of the shape, gathering relevant geometric and topological features of the complex cell form. We present a comparative study of classification performance of additive shape descriptors, namely, Minkowski functionals, and the nonadditive multiscale fractal. We found that the proposed measures perform efficiently the task of identifying the two main classes alpha and beta based solely on scale invariant information, while also providing intraclass morphological assessment.

cond-mat↗