Neurolucida ASC

Neurolucida ASC#

The Neurolucida ASCII format (.asc), produced by MBF Bioscience’s Neurolucida tracing software, stores morphologies as nested S-expressions with rich metadata (spines, markers, contours). braincell reads it through braincell.io.AscReader.

Loading#

import braincell

morpho = braincell.Morphology.from_asc("neuron.asc")

As with SWC, you can request a validation report:

morpho, report = braincell.Morphology.from_asc("neuron.asc", return_report=True)
print(report)   # AscReport: issues found and metadata

What the reader captures#

The ASC reader understands the format’s richer structure than SWC:

  • typed branches (soma, axon, basal/apical dendrite) → braincell branch types;

  • AscSpineRecord — dendritic spine annotations;

  • AscMetadata — file-level metadata;

  • AscReport / AscIssue — the validation report and any problems encountered.

Lower-level reader#

from braincell.io import AscReader

reader = AscReader()
morpho = reader.read("neuron.asc")

See braincell.io module for the full ASC API. For the simpler, more portable format, see SWC.