Information flow drives localized morphological differences across neuronal and glial cell types

Neuron processes-axons and dendrites-have distinct branching patterns related to their biological function in the brain and body. Other non-neuronal cells in the nervous system, glia, also have characteristic branching morphologies. Our previous work has used biological scaling theory to connect branching patterns in neurons to biophysical function such as energy or conduction time minimization and material constrants in a compact, unifying mathematical model. Here, we use functionally relevant structural parameters related to asymmetric branching patterns extracted from our model as features in machine-learning classification methods to highlight differences between different types of neurons and glia as well as between healthy and diseased cells. Notably, we find that parameters related to information flow vary with position in the cell-that is, relative proximity of each branching junction to the soma (cell body) or synapses. We find that for some neuronal and glial cell type comparisons, such as comparisons between medium spiny neuron (MSN) dendrites, incorporating relative branching junction location significantly improves the performance of machine-learning classification methods. Our results imply that differences in information flow across cells drive specific morphological changes that correspond to localized regions of neuronal and glial cells. The promise of our methods and results lay foundation for future studies classifying neuronal and glial cells based on pathology, using our asymmetric scale factors and relative branching junction location as potential biomarkers to identify particular diseases based on both structural differences and the underlying differences in function.