title: Quantitative kinetics of damage and recovery of cytoskeletal structure by means of image analysis.
abstract: The cytoskeleton is a network of proteins which structurally and dynamically organise the cytoplasm of living cells. Microtubules are among its constituents. Morphological alterations of microtubules are related to functional impairment. Therefore cytoskeletal morphology is a valuable indicator of cell injury and functionality. This paper focuses on the comparison between normal and altered cytoskeletal microtubules by means of image analysis and classification with the aim of replacing visual assessment. Morphology has been quantified by the extraction of some descriptors yielded by spatial differentiation, fractal analysis and Fourier analysis followed by non-linear filtering. The principal component analysis of these descriptors has led to image recognition and has been applied to hepatocytes and fibroblasts exposed to some xenobiotics. In the case of hepatocytes, images have been ranked according to the severity of cytoskeletal damage, a dose-response relation has been derived from the regression of the first principal component and the percentage of structural recovery after exposure has been estimated.
authors.affiliation: Inverse Problems and Mathematical Morphology Unit, Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Ambiente e del Territorio, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Piazza della Scienza, 1 20126 Milano, Italy.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Fumarola
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Urani
authors.forename: G F
authors.initials: GF
authors.lastname: Crosta
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D001542:Benomyl / Q000633:toxicity*; D003599:Cytoskeleton / Q000187:drug effects* / Q000648:ultrastructure; D004305:Dose-Response Relationship, Drug; D005347:Fibroblasts; D022781:Hepatocytes; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D007700:Kinetics; D051379:Mice; D008870:Microtubules / Q000187:drug effects* / Q000648:ultrastructure; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D051381:Rats; D041701:Swiss 3T3 Cells
chemical_list: D001542:Benomyl