Open AccessEvaluation of area-based collagen scoring by nonlinear microscopy in chronic hepatitis C-induced liver fibrosis
Author(s) -
David Sevrain,
Matthieu Dubreuil,
Grace Dolman,
Abed M. Zaitoun,
William L. Irving,
Indra Neil Guha,
Christophe Odin,
Yann Le Grand
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
biomedical optics express
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.362
H-Index - 86
ISSN - 2156-7085
DOI - 10.1364/boe.6.001209
Subject(s) - chronic hepatitis , fibrosis , liver fibrosis , pathology , microscopy , medicine , artificial intelligence , biomedical engineering , computer science , virology , virus
In this paper we analyze a fibrosis scoring method based on measurement of the fibrillar collagen area from second harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy images of unstained histological slices from human liver biopsies. The study is conducted on a cohort of one hundred chronic hepatitis C patients with intermediate to strong Metavir and Ishak stages of liver fibrosis. We highlight a key parameter of our scoring method to discriminate between high and low fibrosis stages. Moreover, according to the intensity histograms of the SHG images and simple mathematical arguments, we show that our area-based method is equivalent to an intensity-based method, despite saturation of the images. Finally we propose an improvement of our scoring method using very simple image processing tools.