# 3D Neuron Morphology Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.07044 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07044/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [InfoGraph: Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Graph-Level Representation Learning via Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01000/) (2019)
- [graph2vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05005/) (2017)
- [Point2Skeleton: Learning Skeletal Representations from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00230/) (2020)
- [Learning to Make Predictions on Graphs with Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08352/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider the problem of finding an accurate representation of neuron shapes, extracting sub-cellular features, and classifying neurons based on neuron shapes. In neuroscience research, the skeleton representation is often used as a compact and abstract representation of neuron shapes. However, existing methods are limited to getting and analyzing "curve" skeletons which can only be applied for tubular shapes. This paper presents a 3D neuron morphology analysis method for more general and complex neuron shapes. First, we introduce the concept of skeleton mesh to represent general neuron shapes and propose a novel method for computing mesh representations from 3D surface point clouds. A skeleton graph is then obtained from skeleton mesh and is used to extract sub-cellular features. Finally, an unsupervised learning method is used to embed the skeleton graph for neuron classification. Extensive experiment results are provided and demonstrate the robustness of our method to analyze neuron morphology.