Abstract
A vast number of human pathologic conditions are directly or indirectly
related to tissular collagen structure remodeling. The nonlinear optical
microscopy second-harmonic generation has become a powerful tool for
imaging biological tissues with anisotropic hyperpolarized structures,
such as collagen. During the past years, several quantification methods
to analyze and evaluate these images have been developed. However,
automated or semiautomated solutions are necessary to ensure objectivity
and reproducibility of such analysis. This work describes automation and
improvement methods for calculating the anisotropy (using fast Fourier
transform analysis and the gray-level co-occurrence matrix). These were
applied to analyze biopsy samples of human ovarian epithelial cancer at
different stages of malignancy (mucinous, serous, mixed, and endometrial
subtypes). The semiautomation procedure enabled us to design a
diagnostic protocol that recognizes between healthy and pathologic
tissues, as well as between different tumor types.
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