Figure 5 - Application of Rayburst to reconstruction of a spiny dendritic branch from a layer III pyramidal neuron from prefrontal area 46 in a rhesus monkey (a,b), and a thioflavine S-labeled amyloid plaque from a Tg2576 mouse (c,d).

(a) Maximal projection of the spiny dendrite. (b) Digital representation of the dendrites as a chain of nodes with associated diameters, represented as green balls along the branch. The model is superimposed on a translucent green volume rendering of the branch to illustrate the goodness of fit of model to data. Multicolored spines of various shapes are reconstructed with high-resolution surface meshes, which approximate the true spine shapes in the maximal projections (a) and volume rendered data (b) very closely. (c) Maximal projection from CLSM images of amyloid plaque. (d) Medium-resolution surface mesh reproduces complex shape and surface irregularity of the plaque with good fidelity. Greater resolution of surface irregularity can be achieved by increasing the number of rays in the Rayburst.