School of Biomedical Engineering (Suzhou), Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Suzhou 215163, China.
Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou 215163, China.
Med Mycol. 2024 May 3;62(5). doi: 10.1093/mmy/myae050.
Candida albicans is a pathogenic fungus that undergoes morphological transitions between hyphal and yeast forms, adapting to diverse environmental stimuli and exhibiting distinct virulence. Existing research works on antifungal blue light (ABL) therapy have either focused solely on hyphae or neglected to differentiate between morphologies, obscuring potential differential effects. To address this gap, we established a novel dataset of 150 C. albicans-infected mouse skin tissue slice images with meticulously annotated hyphae and yeast. Eleven representative convolutional neural networks were trained and evaluated on this dataset using seven metrics to identify the optimal model for segmenting hyphae and yeast in original high pixel size images. Leveraging the segmentation results, we analyzed the differential impact of blue light on the invasion depth and density of both morphologies within the skin tissue. U-Net-BN outperformed other models in segmentation accuracy, achieving the best overall performance. While both hyphae and yeast exhibited significant reductions in invasion depth and density at the highest ABL dose (180 J/cm2), only yeast was significantly inhibited at the lower dose (135 J/cm2). This novel finding emphasizes the importance of developing more effective treatment strategies for both morphologies.
白色念珠菌是一种病原真菌，能够在菌丝和酵母形态之间发生形态转变，以适应不同的环境刺激，并表现出明显的毒力。现有的抗真菌蓝光（ABL）治疗研究工作要么仅关注菌丝，要么忽略形态差异，掩盖了潜在的差异效应。为了解决这一差距，我们建立了一个新的包含 150 张白色念珠菌感染的小鼠皮肤组织切片图像的数据集，这些图像经过精心注释，区分了菌丝和酵母。我们在这个数据集上使用七个指标训练和评估了 11 个有代表性的卷积神经网络，以确定在原始高像素大小图像中分割菌丝和酵母的最佳模型。利用分割结果，我们分析了蓝光对皮肤组织中两种形态的入侵深度和密度的差异影响。U-Net-BN 在分割准确性方面优于其他模型，取得了最佳的整体性能。虽然在最高 ABL 剂量（180 J/cm2）下，菌丝和酵母的入侵深度和密度都显著降低，但只有酵母在较低剂量（135 J/cm2）下受到显著抑制。这一新发现强调了为两种形态开发更有效治疗策略的重要性。
