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 neuronal pieces scattered in serial sections are blurred by some morphological noise. This noise may strongly invalidate conclusions drawn from models built using the 3D reconstructions and it must be taken into account when retrieving digitized neurons from available databases. We analyse on several vertebrate neurons examples the main noise-generating sources and the consequences 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 presented in this database. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.