Abstract
Human lymph nodes play a central part of immune defense against infection agents and tumor cells. Lymphoid follicles are compartments of the lymph node which are spherical, mainly filled with Bcells. Bcells are cellular components of the adaptive immune systems. In the course of a specific immune response, lymphoid follicles pass different morphological differentiation stages. The morphology and the spatial distribution of lymphoid follicles can be sometimes associated to a particular causative agent and development stage of a disease. We report our new approach for the automatic detection of follicular regions in histological whole slide images of tissue sections immuno-stained with actin. The method is divided in two phases: (1) shock filter-based detection of transition points and (2) segmentation of follicular regions. Follicular regions in 10 whole slide images were manually annotated by visual inspection, and sample surveys were conducted by an expert pathologist. The results of our method were validated by comparing with the manual annotation. On average, we could achieve a Zijbendos similarity index of 0.71, with a standard deviation of 0.07.
Highlights
A human organism needs a functional immune system to defend against bacteria, viral structures and tumor cells
We report our new approach for the automatic detection of follicular regions in histological whole slide images of tissue sections immuno-stained with actin
Follicular regions in 10 whole slide images were manually annotated by visual inspection, and sample surveys were conducted by an expert pathologist
Summary
A human organism needs a functional immune system to defend against bacteria, viral structures and tumor cells. In this concept an integral part of the adaptive immune system is the structural and cellular flexibility of lymph nodes (Oswald et al 2019). During an ongoing infection and the associated antigenic contact, lymphoid follicles pass different stages of development and change their morphology (Victora and Nussenzweig 2012). As, e.g., follicular lymphoma (Broyde et al 2009), and different benign lymphadenopathies (Weiss and O’malley 2013), are associated with specific morphological findings of lymphoid follicles. Rheumatoid arthritis is characterized by a follicular hyperplasia in which lymphoid follicles become heavily enlarged (Nosanchuk and Schintzier 1969)
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