Neuromantic v1.6.3 Now Available (very minor update)
See Downloads Page for Video Tutorials

Welcome to the Neuromantic website, home page of the handy freeware tool for neuronal reconstruction!

Neuromantic is a free application for the semi-manual or semi-automatic reconstruction of neurons for single images or image stacks. It is being developed primarily by Darren Myatt (d.r.myatt@reading.ac.uk) of the University of Reading. It is completely free to use for non-commercial purposes, such as academic research, although any commercial company wanting to licence it should get in touch. To date, Neuromantic has been downloaded hundreds of times from academic institutions worldwide, and generally averages about one download a day. Neuromantic is also currently used to administrate the NeuroMorpho archive of digitally reconstructed neurons.

Although existing commercial packages such as NeuroLucidaand Imaris provide a lot of the same (and more) functionality, licensing costs generally result in only one system having such software installed, and this is usually the one connected to the microscope. As a result, throughput is significantly reduced as only one person may perform an image capture/reconstruction at once. By also employing freeware software such as Neuromantic, as many reconstructions as required may be performed in parallel, and freedom is increased by removing the necessity for reconstruction to occur in the lab.

It is also hoped that the free nature of the software will encourage student projects in reconstruction, as well as neuronal reconstruction in electrophysiological experiments where it would not otherwise have been considered as an option.

The latest version of Neuromantic can always be found on the Downloads page, and updates are added frequently with additional functionality and bug fixes. The manual is currently needs updating, but there are several recent tutorials on the blog and now some tutorial videos.

The basic functionality was inspired by Neuron_Morpho, but it has been designed to be much more intuitive and user-friendly, facilitating both simple tree creation, visualisation and editing, without having to repeatedly switch applications. Future work will move towards fully automatic reconstruction, even from non-deconvolved Transmitted Light Brightfield (TLB) images. More recent releases (post v1.4.0) also add a lot of the tracing functionality found in NeuronJ, including an extension of the tracing algorithm into 3D and automatic estimation of dendritic radii.

There's also a Neuromantic Users Group, where you can join and ask for advice/report bugs with other users. I may also post some further tutorials on there when I get the opportunity.

The main development of Neuromantic was supported by EPSRC grant GR/S55897/01, and the statistics/graphing aspects by Nuffield Foundation grant URB/34421 (awarded to Nathan Skene).