title: An image processing approach to analyze morphological features of microscopic images of muscle fibers.
abstract: We present an image processing approach to automatically analyze duo-channel microscopic images of muscular fiber nuclei and cytoplasm. Nuclei and cytoplasm play a critical role in determining the health and functioning of muscular fibers as changes of nuclei and cytoplasm manifest in many diseases such as muscular dystrophy and hypertrophy. Quantitative evaluation of muscle fiber nuclei and cytoplasm thus is of great importance to researchers in musculoskeletal studies. The proposed computational approach consists of steps of image processing to segment and delineate cytoplasm and identify nuclei in two-channel images. Morphological operations like skeletonization is applied to extract the length of cytoplasm for quantification. We tested the approach on real images and found that it can achieve high accuracy, objectivity, and robustness.
authors.affiliation: University of Sao Paulo, Institute of Physics at Sao Carlos, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
authors.forename: Cesar Henrique
authors.initials: CH
authors.lastname: Comin
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Xiaoyin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Department of Anesthesia, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Yaming
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: University of Sao Paulo, Institute of Physics at Sao Carlos, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
authors.forename: Luciano da Fontoura
authors.initials: Lda F
authors.lastname: Costa
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Hematology, The Third Military Medical University, Chongqing, China. Electronic address: zyang@tmmu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Zhong
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Yang
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D002478:Cells, Cultured; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D051379:Mice; D008810:Mice, Inbred C57BL; D008853:Microscopy / Q000379:methods*; D018485:Muscle Fibers, Skeletal / Q000166:cytology*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity
keywords: Cytoplasm; Muscle fiber; Nuclei; Quantification; Segmentation; Skeletonization