A Neuronal Morphology Classification Approach Based on Locally Cumulative Connected Deep Neural Networks

Neurons are the basic building and computational units of the nervous system, and have complex and diverse spatial geometric structures. By solving the neuronal classification problem, we can further understand the characteristics of neurons and the process of information transmission. This paper presents a neuronal morphology classification approach based on locally cumulative connected deep neural networks, where 43 geometric features were extracted from two different neuron datasets and applied to classify types of neurons. Then, the effects of different parameters of deep learning networks on the performance of neuron classification were analyzed including mini-batch size, number of intermediate layers, and number of building blocks. The accuracy of the approach was also compared with that of the other mainstream machine learning approaches. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach is effective for solving complex neuronal morphology classification problems.