We monitored developmental alterations in the morphology of dendritic spines in primary cultures of hippocampal neurons using confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) and the fluorescent marker Dil. Dissociated rat hippocampal neurons were plated on polylysine-coated glass cover slips and grown in culture for 1-4 weeks. Fixed cultures were stained with Dil and visualized with the CLSM. Spine d...

Identification and detection of dendritic spines in neuron images are of high interest in diagnosis and treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders (e.g., Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's diseases, and autism). In this paper, we have proposed a novel automatic approach using wavelet-based conditional symmetric analysis and regularized morphological shared-weight neural networks (RMSNN) ...

Fast inhibition in the cortex is gated primarily at GABAergic synapses formed by local interneurons onto postsynaptic targets. Although GABAergic inputs to the somata and axon initial segments of neocortical pyramidal neurons are associated with direct inhibition of action potential generation, the role of GABAergic inputs to distal dendritic segments, including spines, is less well characteriz...