Title
Automatic computational labeling of glomerular textural boundaries.
Abstract
The glomerulus, a specialized bundle of capillaries, is the blood filtering unit of the kidney. Each human kidney contains about 1 million glomeruli. Structural damages in the glomerular micro-compartments give rise to several renal conditions; most severe of which is proteinuria, where excessive blood proteins flow freely to the urine. The sole way to confirm glomerular structural damage in renal pathology is by examining histopathological or immunofluorescence stained needle biopsies under a light microscope. However, this method is extremely tedious and time consuming, and requires manual scoring on the number and volume of structures. Computational quantification of equivalent features promises to greatly ease this manual burden. The largest obstacle to computational quantification of renal tissue is the ability to recognize complex glomerular textural boundaries automatically. Here we present a computational pipeline to accurately identify glomerular boundaries with high precision and accuracy. The computational pipeline employs an integrated approach composed of Gabor filtering, Gaussian blurring, statistical F-testing, and distance transform, and performs significantly better than standard Gabor based textural segmentation method. Our integrated approach provides mean accuracy/precision of 0.89/0.97 on n = 200 Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) glomerulus images, and mean 0.88/0.94 accuracy/precision on n = 200 Periodic Acid Schiff (PAS) glomerulus images. Respective accuracy/precision of the Gabor filter bank based method is 0.83/0.84 for H&E and 0.78/0.8 for PAS. Our method will simplify computational partitioning of glomerular micro-compartments hidden within dense textural boundaries. Automatic quantification of glomeruli will streamline structural analysis in clinic, and can help realize real time diagnoses and interventions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1117/12.2254517
Proceedings of SPIE
Keywords
Field
DocType
Glomerulus,Gabor filter,image segmentation,F-test,distance transform,histology
Blood filtering,Computer vision,Segmentation,Gabor filter bank,Filter (signal processing),Image segmentation,Distance transform,Gaussian,Artificial intelligence,Accuracy and precision,Physics
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
10140
0277-786X
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
2
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Brandon Ginley111.37
John E. Tomaszewski219818.60
Pinaki Sarder325.79