title: A New Method for Automated Identification and Morphometry of Myelinated Fibers Through Light Microscopy Image Analysis.
abstract: Nerve morphometry is known to produce relevant information for the evaluation of several phenomena, such as nerve repair, regeneration, implant, transplant, aging, and different human neuropathies. Manual morphometry is laborious, tedious, time consuming, and subject to many sources of error. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new method for the automated morphometry of myelinated fibers in cross-section light microscopy images. Images from the recurrent laryngeal nerve of adult rats and the vestibulocochlear nerve of adult guinea pigs were used herein. The proposed pipeline for fiber segmentation is based on the techniques of competitive clustering and concavity analysis. The evaluation of the proposed method for segmentation of images was done by comparing the automatic segmentation with the manual segmentation. To further evaluate the proposed method considering morphometric features extracted from the segmented images, the distributions of these features were tested for statistical significant difference. The method achieved a high overall sensitivity and very low false-positive rates per image. We detect no statistical difference between the distribution of the features extracted from the manual and the pipeline segmentations. The method presented a good overall performance, showing widespread potential in experimental and clinical settings allowing large-scale image analysis and, thus, leading to more reliable results.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computing and Mathematics, Faculty of Philosophy, Science and Languages of Ribeirão Preto, University of São Paulo at Ribeirão Preto, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. bourget@usp.br.
authors.forename: Romulo Bourget
authors.initials: RB
authors.lastname: Novas
authors.affiliation: Departament of Surgery and Anatomy, School of Medicine of Ribeirão Preto, University of São Paulo at Ribeirão Preto, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil.
authors.forename: Valeria Paula Sassoli
authors.initials: VP
authors.lastname: Fazan
authors.affiliation: Department of Computing and Mathematics, Faculty of Philosophy, Science and Languages of Ribeirão Preto, University of São Paulo at Ribeirão Preto, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil.
authors.forename: Joaquim Cezar
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Felipe
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D006168:Guinea Pigs; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D007823:Laryngeal Nerves / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D008853:Microscopy / Q000379:methods*; D009413:Nerve Fibers, Myelinated; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D051381:Rats; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D000159:Vestibulocochlear Nerve / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*
keywords: Automated object detection; Biomedical image analysis; Image Segmentation; Medical imaging; Morphometry