The problem of the morphological noise in reconstructed dendritic arborizations

For technical, instrumental and operator-related reasons, three-dimensional (3D) reconstructions of neurons obtained from intracellularly stained neur onal pieces scattered in serial sections are blurred by some morphological noise. This noise may strongly invalidate conclusions drawn from models bui lt using the 3D reconstructions and it must be taken into account when retr ieving digitized neurons from available databases. We analyse on several ve rtebrate neurons examples the main noise-generating sources and the consequ ences of the noise on the 'quality' of the data. We show how the noise can be detected and evaluated in any database, if sufficient information is pre sented in this database. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved .