dendritic spine quantification

[Darren Scully]

Hi,

I had asked previously to see if anybody knew how to count dendritic spines on dendrites.  I got an excellent referal to the programme NeuronJ.  But I was wondering is there any way to count the dendritic spines by using an automatic technique. For example, maybe binarizing the image, then getting the value of the dendrite plus spines. Then to get the spine number, removing the value for the dendrite itself, leaving just the spine number in that image.

If anyone has ever used the software to do this or has any ideas, I would be very grateful.  Like I said before, I am a new user, so apologies if this has been covered before.

Many thanks.

Darren