Filament tracing

Plugin designed to allow easy semi-automatic tracing of neurons or other filament-like structures (e.g., microtubules, blood vessels) through either 2D images or 3D image stacks. Data can be imported and exported in SWC files for interaction with other software, or details of the traces can be exported as CSV files for analysis in spreadsheets or statistical software.

This plugin is included in Fiji by default.

The Sholl technique is used to describe neuronal arbors. This plugin can perform Sholl directly on 2D and 3D grayscale images of isolated neurons. Its internal algorithm to collect data is based upon how Sholl analysis is done by hand — it creates a series of concentric shells (circles or spheres) around the focus of a neuronal arbor, and counts how many times connected voxels defining the arbor intersect the sampling shells. The major advantages of this plugin over other implementations are:

• When analyzing images directly, it does not require previous tracing of the arbor (although it can also analyze traced arbors)
• It combines curve fitting with several methods to automatically retrieve quantitative descriptors from sampled data, which allows direct statistical comparisons between arbors
• It allows continuous and repeated sampling around user-defined foci
• It allows batch processing