Performing neural research with Blender
And more brain-related science news: Performing neural research with Blender? Check! Student Patrick Herbers has simulated the growth of neural dendritic structures. The MST-Dendrites add-on that was used for this research is available for download.
Martin Pyka writes:A student of mine, Patrick Herbers, recently released as part of his Bachelor thesis an addon that brings the TREEs algorithm to Blender.
TREEs is a variation of the minimum spanning trees algorithm that allows to create dendritic tree structures with similar properties as the dendritic trees of real neurons. The addon for Blender that implements this algorithms is available on Github. Here is a little demonstration of how to use it.
Thanks for sharing. Python and Matlab are anyway the standard languages in neuroscience. And Blender is a good prototyping environment for Python applications, especially when 3d data have to be handled.
Here is another interesting addon that facilitates the analysis of real dendritic structures
http://cvlab.epfl.ch/NeuroMorph