Journal Article

Histological Quantitation of Brain Injury Using Whole Slide Imaging: A Pilot Validation Study in Mice

Shin, Dmitriy, Shyu, Chi-Ren, Tomlison, Brittany N., Gu, Zezong, Mikhail, Kovalenko, Korkin, Dmitry, Chen, Zhenzhou, Hadass, Orr, Chen, Shanyan, Cui, Jiankun, Anthony, Douglas C.

2014

Overview

Quantitative assessment of serial brain sections provides an objective measure of neurological events at cellular and molecular levels but is difficult to implement in experimental neuroscience laboratories because of variation from person-to-person and the time required for analysis. Whole slide imaging (WSI) technology, recently introduced for pathological diagnoses, offers an electronic environment and a variety of computational tools for performing high-throughput histological analysis and managing the associated information. In our study, we applied various algorithms to quantify histologic changes associated with brain injury and compared the results to manual assessment. WSI showed a high degree of concordance with manual quantitation by Pearson correlation and strong agreement using Bland-Altman plots in: (i) cortical necrosis in cresyl-violet-stained brain sections of mice after focal cerebral ischemia; (ii) intracerebral hemorrhage in ischemic mouse brains for automated annotation of the small regions, rather than whole hemisphere of the tissue sections; (iii) Iba1-immunoreactive cell density in the adjacent and remote brain regions of mice subject to controlled cortical impact (CCI); and (iv) neuronal degeneration by silver staining after CCI. These results show that WSI, when appropriately applied and carefully validated, is a highly efficient and unbiased tool to locate and identify neuropathological features, delineate affected regions and histologically quantify these events.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Algorithms / Animals / Annotations / Attorneys / Automation / Biology and Life Sciences / Brain / Brain injuries / Brain Injuries - complications / Brain Injuries - pathology / Brain injury / Cell Count / Cell density / Cerebral Cortex - pathology / Cerebral Hemorrhage - complications / Cerebral Hemorrhage - pathology / Comparative analysis / Computational neuroscience / Cortex / Degeneration / Head injuries / Hemorrhage / Information management / Ischemia / Laboratory tests / Law schools / Male / Medical imaging / Medicine and Health Sciences / Mice / Mice, Inbred C57BL / Microglia - pathology / Necrosis / Nerve Degeneration - complications / Nerve Degeneration - pathology / Nervous system / Neurodegeneration / Neuroimaging / Neuroimaging - methods / Neurons / Neurosciences / Pathology / Pilot Projects / Quantitation / Research and Analysis Methods / Silver / Silver Staining / Software / Traumatic brain injury