Abstract
Grey level co-occurrence matrix analysis (GLCM) is a well-known mathematical method for quantification of cell and tissue textural properties, such as homogeneity, complexity and level of disorder. Recently, it was demonstrated that this method is capable of evaluating fine structural changes in nuclear structure that otherwise are undetectable during standard microscopy analysis. In this article, we present the results indicating that entropy, angular second moment, variance, and texture correlation of lymphocyte nuclear structure determined by GLCM method are different in thymus cortex when compared to medulla. A total of 300 thymus lymphocyte nuclei from 10 one-month-old mice were analyzed: 150 nuclei from cortex and 150 nuclei from medullar regions of thymus. Nuclear GLCM analysis was carried out using National Institutes of Health ImageJ software. For each nucleus, entropy, angular second moment, variance and texture correlation were determined. Cortical lymphocytes had significantly higher chromatin angular second moment (p < 0.001) and texture correlation (p < 0.05) compared to medullar lymphocytes. Nuclear GLCM entropy and variance of cortical lymphocytes were on the other hand significantly lower than in medullar lymphocytes (p < 0.001). These results suggest that GLCM as a method might have a certain potential in detecting discrete changes in nuclear structure associated with lymphocyte migration and maturation in thymus.
Highlights
During the past several decades, there have been numerous research efforts to design and implement a simple, accurate, and affordable computational biology method for quantification and evaluation of nuclear architecture
We present the results indicating that entropy, angular second moment, variance, and texture correlation of lymphocyte nuclear structure determined by Grey level co-occurrence matrix analysis (GLCM) method are different in thymus cortex when compared to medulla
The results of our study suggest that lymphocytes of thymus medulla might have higher nuclear GLCM entropy and variance than lymphocytes in thymus cortex
Summary
During the past several decades, there have been numerous research efforts to design and implement a simple, accurate, and affordable computational biology method for quantification and evaluation of nuclear architecture. It was introduced in the work of Haralick et al (1973), who have established a total of 14 parameters based on pixel pair grey level occurrences within a grey scale image. GLCM was successfully applied in nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (Li et al 2009), computed tomography (Huber et al 2011) and other clinical research areas. Losa et al suggested that in cell cultures, GLCM parameters of nuclear structure may be important for evaluation of chromatin structural changes during apoptosis (Losa and Castelli 2005)
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