title: Automatic identification and validation of planar collagen organization in the aorta wall with application to abdominal aortic aneurysm.
abstract: Arterial physiology relies on a delicate three-dimensional (3D) organization of cells and extracellular matrix, which is remarkably altered by vascular diseases like abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA). The ability to explore the micro-histology of the aorta wall is important in the study of vascular pathologies and in the development of vascular constitutive models, i.e., mathematical descriptions of biomechanical properties of the wall. The present study reports and validates a fast image processing sequence capable of quantifying collagen fiber organization from histological stains. Powering and re-normalizing the histogram of the classical fast Fourier transformation (FFT) is a key step in the proposed analysis sequence. This modification introduces a powering parameter w, which was calibrated to best fit the reference data obtained using classical FFT and polarized light microscopy (PLM) of stained histological slices of AAA wall samples. The values of w = 3 and 7 give the best correlation (Pearson's correlation coefficient larger than 0.7, R 2 about 0.7) with the classical FFT approach and PLM measurements. A fast and operator independent method to identify collagen organization in the arterial wall was developed and validated. This overcomes severe limitations of currently applied methods like PLM to identify collagen organization in the arterial wall.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Solid Mechanics, Mechatronics and Biomechanics, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Stanislav
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Polzer
authors.forename: T Christian
authors.initials: TC
authors.lastname: Gasser
authors.forename: Caroline
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Forsell
authors.forename: Hana
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Druckmüllerova
authors.forename: Michal
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tichy
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Staffa
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Vlachovsky
authors.forename: Jiri
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bursa
mesh_terms: D001011:Aorta / Q000737:chemistry*; D017544:Aortic Aneurysm, Abdominal / Q000473:pathology*; D057205:Automation, Laboratory / Q000379:methods*; D003094:Collagen / Q000032:analysis*; D005583:Fourier Analysis; D006651:Histocytochemistry / Q000379:methods*; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008859:Microscopy, Polarization
chemical_list: D003094:Collagen