Dendrite Tracking in Microscopic Images using Minimum Spanning Trees and Localized E-M

We describe in this document our preliminary results regarding the tracking of dendrites spreading from a neuron in confocal microscope im- ages. When using a small number of image layers, we obtain good results by combining a EM-based local estimate of the probability that an image pixel belongs to a neuron filament with the global tree properties of the complete set of dendrites. The optimal tree is obtained with a modified minimum-spanning tree procedure. We will argue that this approach extends naturally to the complete data volume and should give even better results.