Improved automatic centerline tracing for dendritic structures

Centerline tracing of dendritic structures in confocal images of neurons is an essential tool for the construction of a geometric representation of a neuronal network. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm (ORION 2) for centerline extraction that is both highly accurate and computationally efficient. The main novelty of the proposed method is the use of a small set of Multiscale Isotropic Laplacian filters for a fast and efficient binarization of the dendritic structure.The performance of this algorithm, which is validated using datasets from DIADEM is shown to be very competitive against other state-of-the-art algorithms.