A mathematical morphology approach to the extraction of nerve cell structures

This paper presents a new approach to extract nerve cell structures using mathematical morphology tools. Particularly, the structures produced by the proposed method include soma and skeleton of neurons. The process is decomposed into three stages: first, a preprocessing step is implemented to invert the image; second, a separation step is performed to eliminate the dendrites; third, the skeleton is applied to trace the neuron shape with a minimum number of pixels.