Spine repair process and multiresolutional Reeb graph computation.

<p>Spines are colored with a gradient whereby the closest points to the insertion point were colored green and the furthest points were colored purple. <b>(A)</b> Example of a fragmented spine. The fragmentation problem is solved by applying the closing morphological operator, and the spine is completely connected. <b>(B)</b> Example of the reconstruction of a spine detached from its dendritic shaft. The spine was oriented so as to align the insertion point and its closest vertex with the z-axis. The gap between the spine and the dendritic shaft is filled by means of an iterative process starting from the base of the spine. This resulted in the growth of the missing neck. <b>(C)</b> Geodesic distance computation from the insertion point. The black line denotes the shortest path from the insertion point to an arbitrary point on the surface of the spine. <b>(D)</b> The domain of the geodesic distance on the surface of the spine was divided into seven regions. <b>(E)</b> Regions and segments between curves provide enough information to reconstruct an approximation of the surface. Features extracted from these regions and segments must conform a complete set of spine topology to provide for a proper computer simulation. <b>(F)</b> Curves were approximated by the best fitting plane resulting in ellipses that improve the characterization and interpretation of the geometry of the spine. Features were computed on this final 3D representation.