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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1007/s10278-015-9804-6
Journal of digital imaging
Keywords
Field
DocType
Medical imaging,Automated object detection,Biomedical image analysis,Image Segmentation,Morphometry
Statistical difference,Computer vision,Vestibulocochlear nerve,Segmentation,Computer science,Medical imaging,Image segmentation,Artificial intelligence,Microscopy,Cluster analysis,Recurrent laryngeal nerve
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
29
1
1618-727X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
7
Authors
3