Institute of Solid Mechanics, Mechatronics and Biomechanics, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic.
Microsc Microanal. 2013 Dec;19(6):1395-404. doi: 10.1017/S1431927613013251. Epub 2013 Sep 9.
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.
动脉生理学依赖于细胞和细胞外基质的精细三维（3D）组织，而血管疾病如腹主动脉瘤（AAA）会显著改变这种组织。探索主动脉壁的微观组织学对于研究血管病理学和开发血管本构模型（即壁的生物力学特性的数学描述）非常重要。本研究报告并验证了一种快速图像处理序列，该序列能够从组织学染色中定量胶原纤维组织。为了进行所提出的分析序列，对经典快速傅里叶变换（FFT）的直方图进行功率和重新归一化是一个关键步骤。该修改引入了一个功率参数 w，该参数经过校准，以最佳拟合使用经典 FFT 和 AAA 壁样本染色组织切片的偏光显微镜（PLM）获得的参考数据。w = 3 和 7 的值与经典 FFT 方法和 PLM 测量具有最佳相关性（Pearson 相关系数大于 0.7，R 2 约为 0.7）。开发并验证了一种快速且不依赖于操作人员的方法来识别动脉壁中的胶原组织。这克服了当前应用的方法（如 PLM）在识别动脉壁中的胶原组织方面的严重局限性。
