Comunicación
Nº 022
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[Título] [Introducción] [Material y Métodos] [Resultados] [Discusión] [Iconografía] [Bibliografía]
Marco Masseroli, Francisco O'Valle, Trinidad Caballero, Raimundo G.M. Del Moral, César Ramírez, Miguel Andújar, Raimundo G. Del Moral.
Department of Pathology, School of Medicine and University Hospital, University of Granada, 18012 Granada, Spain
Dpto. de Anatomía Patológica, Facultad de Medicina, Avda. de Madrid 11 - 18012 Granada, SPAIN
BACKGROUND: Recent advances in innovative techniques such as videomicroscopy and quantitative pathology in general have made these of great interest to researchers and clinicians as a means to improve the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. The progression of many diseases of different organs leads to fibrosis, one of the most important morphologic changes. New techniques in videomicroscopy and image analysis offer an automatic, accurate and objective quantification of fibrosis in several organs that is not available using traditional techniques. The present study uses a new application of quantitative videomicroscopy, Fibrosis HR®, for the quantification of fibrosis and the evaluation of renal glomerular and hepatic porto-periportal morphology in renal and hepatic biopsies, respectively.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The videomicroscopy techniques and image analysis algorithms used allow the automatic segmentation of the fibrosis and the most relevant morphologic components present in the renal glomeruli and the hepatic porto-periportal region. The areas of all the elements extracted are automatically quantified in µm² and percentages. The results of the evaluation of renal samples confirmed the high precision and sensitivity of interstitial fibrosis quantifications by Fibrosis HR®, which discriminated well between treatment groups with mean fibrosis differences below 5%. These differences correlated significantly with the functional analytic values of creatinine and urea in serum. In hepatic biopsies, the distributions of histologic parameter values quantified by Fibrosis HR® showed that although Knodell and Scheuer's conventional semi-quantitative histologic indexes for fibrosis are important to determine lesional patterns, they cannot evaluate with adequate sensitivity the amount of fibrosis really present in the liver.
CONCLUSIONS: The results of the evaluation show that videomicroscopy and image analysis, when correctly and specifically implemented, provide objective, accurate and highly sensitive histomorphologic quantifications. This makes Fibrosis HR® an extremely useful instrument in clinical and experimental pathology for the rapid quantification of fibrosis and of morphologic modifications in hepatic and renal diseases.
Key Words
: Fibrosis, Kidney, Liver, Glomerular morphometry, Porto-periportal morphometry, Image processing, Automatic quantification, Morphologic quantification.
Marco Masseroli is a postdoctoral fellow of the Pathology Department of the School of Medicine, University of Granada, where he develops image analysis applications in histopathological videomicroscopy.
Granada, renowned world-wide for the Alhambra Palace, is the most important university town of the Andalusía region. Located in the south of Spain it is close to both the beaches of the "Costa del Sol" and the snows of "Sierra Nevada". We look forward to seeing you at The Twenty-Second Annual Course on the Surgical Pathology of Neoplastic Diseases organized by the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Granada (May 1999). |
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