Extended morphometric analysis of neuronal cells with Minkowski valuations

Abstract.Minkowski valuations provide a systematic framework for quantifying different aspects of morphology. In this paper we apply vector- and tensor-valued Minkowski valuations to neuronal cells from the cat's retina in order to describe their morphological structure in a comprehensive way. We introduce the framework of Minkowski valuations, discuss their implementation for neuronal cells and show how they can be used to characterize cells of different morphological categories. We also provide a comparison to a Sholl analysis.