Evaluation of area-based collagen scoring by nonlinear microscopy in chronic hepatitis C-induced liver fibrosis

David Sevrain; Matthieu Dubreuil; Grace Elizabeth Dolman; Abed Zaitoun; William Irving; Indra Neil Guha; Christophe Odin; Yann Le Grand

doi:10.1364/BOE.6.001209

Evaluation of area-based collagen scoring by nonlinear microscopy in chronic hepatitis C-induced liver fibrosis

Biomed Opt Express. 2015 Mar 11;6(4):1209-18. doi: 10.1364/BOE.6.001209. eCollection 2015 Apr 1.

Authors

David Sevrain¹, Matthieu Dubreuil², Grace Elizabeth Dolman³, Abed Zaitoun⁴, William Irving⁵, Indra Neil Guha³, Christophe Odin⁶, Yann Le Grand²

Affiliations

¹ University of Brest, EA938 Laboratoire de Spectrométrie et Optique Laser, SFR Scinbios, 6 avenue le Gorgeu CS 93837, Brest Cedex 3, 29238, France ; IMNC - UMR8165 Campus d'Orsay, Bât 440, 91405 Orsay Cedex, France.
² University of Brest, EA938 Laboratoire de Spectrométrie et Optique Laser, SFR Scinbios, 6 avenue le Gorgeu CS 93837, Brest Cedex 3, 29238, France.
³ NIHR Nottingham Digestive Diseases Biomedical Research Unit, Nottingham, UK.
⁴ Nottingham University Hospitals, Department of Histopathology, UK.
⁵ NIHR Nottingham Digestive Diseases Biomedical Research Unit, Nottingham, UK ; University of Nottingham, School of Molecular Medical Science, Nottingham, UK.
⁶ University of Rennes 1, UMR CNRS 6251 Institut de Physique de Rennes, 263 avenue du Général Leclerc CS 74205, Rennes Cedex, 35042, France.

Abstract

In this paper we analyze a fibrosis scoring method based on measurement of the fibrillar collagen area from second harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy images of unstained histological slices from human liver biopsies. The study is conducted on a cohort of one hundred chronic hepatitis C patients with intermediate to strong Metavir and Ishak stages of liver fibrosis. We highlight a key parameter of our scoring method to discriminate between high and low fibrosis stages. Moreover, according to the intensity histograms of the SHG images and simple mathematical arguments, we show that our area-based method is equivalent to an intensity-based method, despite saturation of the images. Finally we propose an improvement of our scoring method using very simple image processing tools.

Keywords: (110.2960) Image analysis; (170.1610) Clinical applications; (170.3880) Medical and biological imaging; (170.4580) Optical diagnostics for medicine; (180.4315) Nonlinear microscopy.