Automated morphometric analysis of the cat retinal α/Y, β/X and δ ganglion cells using wavelet statistical moment and clustering algorithms

Computational morphological analysis comprises the development of measures (indicators) that describe different form attributes of a neuron and provides additional parameters for classification algorithms. Our work addressed the problem of small group sizes often encountered in neuromorphological and neurophysiological research, automated classification tasks (unsupervised learning) and introduced a new morphological measure: the wavelet statistical moment. We analysed cat α/Y, β/X and δ Golgi-stained retinal ganglion cells using six different shape features (circularity, 2nd statistical moment and entropy of Gaussian blurred images, wavelet statistical moment, number of terminations and the fractal dimension). This allowed us to compare the sensitivity of the methods in uniquely describing morphological attributes of these cells.