# Morphological Reconstruction of Detached Dendritic Spines via Geodesic Path Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.08809 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08809/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Dynamic Exploration on Segment-Proposal Graphs for Tubular Centerline Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18930/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Morphological reconstruction of dendritic spines from fluorescent microscopy is a critical open problem in neuro-image analysis. Existing segmentation tools are ill-equipped to handle thin spines with long, poorly illuminated neck membranes. We address this issue, and introduce an unsupervised path prediction technique based on a stochastic framework which seeks the optimal solution from a path-space of possible spine neck reconstructions. Our method is specifically designed to reduce bias due to outliers, and is adept at reconstructing challenging shapes from images plagued by noise and poor contrast. Experimental analyses on two photon microscopy data demonstrate the efficacy of our method, where an improvement of 12.5% is observed over the state-of-the-art in terms of mean absolute reconstruction error.