Abstract
The ability to evaluate microvessels in tissues is important across many therapeutic areas in both preclinical studies as well as clinical trials which seek potential biomarkers of vascular injury. There is an urgent need for more accurate, reproducible microvessel measurements that do not require tedious, manual counting under a microscope. The time spent by a pathologist in training others to manually count vessels and to review the work is a bottleneck in this area. The Aperio Microvessel Analysis tool, an image analysis tool that identifies and counts vessels stained with an endothelial cell marker, was compared to manual counting for its accuracy and precision in mouse matrigel whole slide images. Manual counting of blood vessels by two PhD scientists had a low precision rate with a concordance of only 60% compared to precision by the automated approach of 87.4%. Expected error rates averaged 13.6% for statistics that were based on individual vessels (e.g. vessel perimeter or individual vessel area) and 12.2% for microvessel density measurements. Other advantages to automated microvessel analysis on whole slides include speed; both the scanning and analysis time can be accomplished in minutes. Additional advantages include quantitative vessel measurements and statistics which are calculated by the software algorithm. Further work will expand the validation to other tissue types and will compare concordance between trained pathologists and between trained pathologists and automated analysis.
Published Version
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