Reconstruction of astrocyte morphology based on the fast marching method with a new speed profile

Goslavskit L.N., Brazhe A.R.
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Astrocytes, a key type of macroglial cell in the central nervous system, are characterized by a complex three-dimensional morphology that is closely linked to their function and undergoes changes during development, plasticity, and pathology. Automated quantitative reconstruction of this morphology from confocal microscopy images remains a methodological challenge due to the high spatial diversity of processes, data noise, and the lack of specialized open-source tools. This paper presents a novel algorithm for the automatic reconstruction of astrocyte morphology, based on a combination of multi-scale anisotropy analysis and the fast marching method. The core innovation lies in constructing a speed profile for the eikonal equation by normalizing the response of the Sato filter with the magnitude of the brightness gradient projection onto the direction perpendicular to the branch centerline. This approach effectively highlights the medial axes of processes of varying calibers. The reconstruction is achieved by building a graph from the trajectories of gradient descent on a time-of-arrival map initiated from the cell soma. For parameterizing the resulting trees, topological morphological descriptors and an analysis of the power-law distribution of the leaf count of the graph nodes were used. The algorithm was validated on an open dataset of hippocampal astrocyte images from rats at different postnatal developmental stages. It is shown that the distribution of node weights in the reconstructions follows a power law, whose exponent monotonically decreases with age, reflecting an increase in the hierarchical order of the morphology. A low-dimensional UMAP representation of persistence images, constructed from the reconstructions, revealed a clear “maturation axis” along which cells cluster according to the animal’s age. The proposed method provides a reliable open-source tool for the objective quantitative analysis of complex three-dimensional astrocyte architecture, which is essential for research in developmental neurobiology, astroglial physiology.

Keywords: astrocytes, morphology, fast marching method
Citation in English: Goslavskit L.N., Brazhe A.R. Reconstruction of astrocyte morphology based on the fast marching method with a new speed profile // Computer Research and Modeling, 2026, vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 1365-1377
Citation in English: Goslavskit L.N., Brazhe A.R. Reconstruction of astrocyte morphology based on the fast marching method with a new speed profile // Computer Research and Modeling, 2026, vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 1365-1377
DOI: 10.20537/2076-7633-2026-18-5-1365-1377
URL: http://crm-en.ics.org.ru/journal/article/3785/
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Copyright © 2026 Goslavskit L.N., Brazhe A.R.

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