Morphometric descriptors and cable modelling of dendritic arborizations based on 3-dimensional reconstructions.

The main goal of this paper is twofold. First, to classify some of the quantitative morphological descriptors within a common theoretical framework and to illustrate their use in the neurobiological research. The second aim is to describe how the computer modelling of dendritic impulse propagation could be related to those high-fidelity morphological databases of dendritic arborizations that we had obtained by three-dimensional reconstructions. Most of the illustrative examples cited here were chosen from morphological and computer simulation studies published by our institute in the past few years. The selection of different morphological parameters in reliability tests of our newly developed 3DARBOR three-dimensional neuronal tree reconstruction system was also cited as an example. The advantages of the parallelled morphological and computational approach in the study of dendritic arborizations were discussed. A full flow chart that gives an outline of the methods we followed in setting up a morphologically accurate cable model was also presented.