The Structure of an SWC

SWCs and Nodes

The SWC object represents a single SWC file.

In this example we’ll read an SWC and print the number of nodes it contains:

import swick

my_swc = swick.read_swc('path/to/swc_file.swc')

print(len(my_swc.nodes))

These nodes describe the 3D points that make up the tree, their radii and type specifiers, and the connection to their parent node (except in the case of a root node, which has no parent).

Often times SWC files contain just one object (and therefore one root node), but some files contain multiple disconnected objects, each a tree-like structure with its own root node.

The SWC attribute nodes is a dictionary that maps IDs to Node objects. Each Node object has its own attributes to retrieve position, type, size, and connection information.