Title
A new method for detecting brain fibrosis in microscopy images using the neurocysticercosis pig model
Date Issued
01 January 2020
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
conference paper
Publisher(s)
SPIE
Abstract
Neurocysticercosis (NCC) is considered a major cause of acquired epilepsy in most developing countries. Humans and pigs acquire cysticercosis ingesting T. solium eggs by the fecal-oral route. After ingestion, oncospheres disperse throughout the body producing cysts mainly in the central nervous system and striated muscles. The treatment is focused on antiparasitic, anti-inflammatory, and antiepileptic drugs; however, new drugs are being studied in animal models recently. The aim of this study was to perform histological image analysis of pig brains with NCC after antiparasitic treatment to develop future tools to study brain inflammation since usually the evaluation of fibrosis is obtained manually on microscopy images in a long, inaccurate, poorly reproducible, and tedious process. For this purpose, the slides of pig brains with NCC were stained with Masson's Trichrome, and high quality photographic images were taken. Then, image processing and machine learning were performed to detect the presence and extension of collagen fibers around the cyst as markers of fibrosis. The process includes the use of color normalization and probabilistic classification implemented in Java language as a plugin to the free access program ImageJ. This paper presents a new method to detect cerebral fibrosis, assessing the amount of fibrosis in the images with accuracy above 75% in 12 seconds. A manual editing tool allows us to raise the results above 90% faster and efficiently.
Volume
11510
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Neurología clínica Parasitología
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85092627276
ISSN of the container
0277786X
ISBN of the container
9781510638266
Conference
Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering: Applications of Digital Image Processing XLIII 2020
Sponsor(s)
We are grateful to field and laboratory team of the Cysticercosis Working Group in Peru (CWGP) and we specially thank Gianfranco, Anita, Juan and Elton for their excellent job. This work was supported by project # 19-488-INT Universidad de Ibagué and research grants # R01AI116456 and # D43TW001140 National Institutes of Health.
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus