Figure 2
From: Quantifying barcodes of dendritic spines using entropy-based metrics
Algorithm to derive the profile plot of dendrites, which is then used to calculate the sample entropy of dendritic spines.
(A) Using fluorescent images, individual dendrites are first selected and then straightened using the ‘straight’ tool of the ImageJ program. (B) The images are converted in B/W masks using the ‘Auto local threshold’ tool (parameters: method ‘mean’, radius 40). (C) The masks are then skeletonized in order to identify the main dendritic stem and the point of emergence of the spines. (D) This mask is then used to cut all the background on the original image, using an operation “AND” between the original image and the skeletonized one. (E) Finally, the resulting image is analyzed using the profile plot tool, thereby quantifying the position of each spine along the dendrite. The sample entropy of this profile (data sequence) is then calculated using a custom script in R environment (see Supplementary Methods).
