Brain tissue tessellation shows absence of canonical microcircuits

Abstract

We provide a novel, fast and cheap method for the morphological evaluation of simple 2-D images taken from histological samples. This method, based on computational geometry, leads to a novel kind of "tessellation" of every type of biological picture, in order to locate the zones equipped with very fine-grained differences in the tissue texture, compared with the surrounding ones. As an example, we apply the technique to the evaluation of histological images from brain sections and demonstrate that the cortical layers, rather than being a canonical assembly of homogeneous cells as usually believed, display scattered neuronal micro-clusters equipped with higher activity than the surrounding ones.

Keywords: Brain; Histology; Phrenology; Topology; Voronoi.