On the potential of the excluded volume and autocorrelation as neuromorphometric descriptors

This work investigates at what degree two neuromorphometric measurements, namely the autocorrelation and the excluded volume of a neuronal cell can influence the characterization and classification of such type of cells. While the autocorrelation function presents good potential for quantifying the dendrite–dendrite connectivity of cells in mosaic tilings, the excluded volume, i.e., the amount of the surround space which is geometrically not accessible to an axon or dendrite, provides a complementary characterization of the cell connectivity. The potential of such approaches is illustrated with respect to real neuronal cells.