  Automatic 3D reconstruction of glia morphology is a powerful tool necessary
for investigating the role of microglia in neurological disorders in the
central nervous system. Current glia skeleton reconstruction techniques fail to
capture an accurate tracing of the processes over time, useful for the study of
the microglia motility and morphology in the brain during healthy and diseased
states. We propose Hieroglyph, a fully automatic temporal 3D skeleton
reconstruction algorithm for glia imaged via 3D multiphoton microscopy.
Hieroglyph yielded a 21% performance increase compared to state of the art
automatic skeleton reconstruction methods and outperforms the state of the art
in different measures of consistency on datasets of 3D images of microglia. The
results from this method provide a 3D graph and digital reconstruction of glia
useful for a myriad of morphological analyses that could impact studies in
brain immunology and disease.
