Attachmentpoints and Endpoint-problem

Posted by maringa on Jun 15, 2009; 2:31am
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/Attachmentpoints-and-Endpoint-problem-tp3692095.html

Hi there,

I'm working with neurons and right now I'm stuck on one and a half problem.
1) Endpoint-detection of the neurites, working so so... (image)
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/433/endpoints.jpg

My idea was to first remove the cellbodies, leaving the image with just neurites, and
then erode by 1px (the neurites gets 1px shorter) and then skeletonize. This image
is then subtracted from a copy of this skeletonized image, but the copy is not eroded
so the subtraction results in small dots which I hoped to be the endpoints. Turned out to be a lot more irrellevant dots than I wanted...

2) Attachmentpoints.

My idea here was to use dilate-filter, dilate the neurites by a couple of pixels to generate a cross
where it enters the cellbody. Then use some kind of transformation to count the crosses... is this possible in the first place?

There are a lot of problems associated with this, for example it's really hard to make a nice cross...

Any ideas on this? It really got me stuck for a couple of weeks...