PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Ali Özgür Argunşah
AU  - Ertunç Erdil
AU  - Muhammad Usman Ghani
AU  - Yazmín Ramiro Cortés
AU  - Anna Felicity Hobbiss
AU  - Theofanis Karayannis
AU  - Müjdat Çetin
AU  - Inbal Israely
AU  - Devrim Ünay
TI  - SpineS: An interactive time-series analysis software for dendritic spines
AID  - 10.1101/2020.09.12.294546
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.09.12.294546
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/09/14/2020.09.12.294546.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/09/14/2020.09.12.294546.full
AB  - Live fluorescence imaging has shown the dynamic nature of dendritic spines, with changes in shape occurring both during development and in response to activity. The structure of a dendritic spine positively correlates with its functional efficacy. Learning and memory studies have shown that great deal of the information stored by a neuron is contained in the synapses. High precision tracking of synaptic structures can give hints about the dynamic nature of memory and help us to understand how memories evolve both in biological and artificial neural networks. Experiments that aim to investigate the dynamics behind the structural changes of dendritic spines require the collection and analysis of large time-series datasets. In this paper, we present an open-source software called SpineS for the automatic longitudinal structural analysis of dendritic spines with additional features for manual intervention to ensure optimal analysis. Our extensive experimental analyses on multiple datasets demonstrate that SpineS can achieve a high-level performance on samples collected both by two-photon and confocal imaging systems.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.