Abstract
An automatic method for quantification of images of microvessels by computing area proportions and number of objects is presented. The objects are segmented from the background using dynamic thresholding of the average component size histogram. To be able to count the objects, fragmented objects are connected, all objects are filled, and touching objects are separated using a watershed segmentation algorithm.The method is fully automatic and robust with respect to illumination and focus settings.A test set consisting of images grabbed with different focus and illumination for each field of view, was used to test the method, and the proposed method showed less variation than the intraoperator variation using manual threshold.Further, the method showed good correlation to manual object counting (r = 0.80) on an other test set.
Highlights
Angiogenesis, or neovascularisation, is by definition formation of new capillaries from preexisting bloodvessels
The process of neovascularisation is regulated by numerous growth factors, vascular endothelial cells, and matrix proteins released from host stromal cells such as macrophages and mast cells [10]
We have found that the results improved slightly if we grabbed colour images and used the first principal component (PC) [14] image instead
Summary
Angiogenesis, or neovascularisation, is by definition formation of new capillaries from preexisting bloodvessels. The process of neovascularisation is regulated by numerous growth factors, vascular endothelial cells, and matrix proteins released from host stromal cells such as macrophages and mast cells [10]. There is evidence from in vivo and in vitro studies that tumour growth is dependent upon neovascularisation. Induction of angiogenesis is a prerequisite for tumours to grow beyond approximately 1–2 mm2 [9]. Most studies are indicating a significant correlation to prognostic factors such as survival, progression, metastasis and recurrence [8,17,20,25,27, 28]. Some studies though, have failed to find any correlation [6,15]
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