Deep Learning for Analysis of Collagen Fiber Organization in Scar Tissue

Thi Tram Anh Pham, Hyeonsoo Kim, Yeachan Lee, Hyun Wook Kang, Suhyun Park

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

The evaluation of the morphology and organization of collagen fibers is critical in understanding wound healing and tissue remodeling after a thermal injury of the skin. However, histological analysis conducted by pathologists is often labor-intensive and limited to qualitative evaluations and scoring within a narrow field of view. In this study, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) model to classify Masson's trichrome (MT)-stained histology images of burn-induced scar tissue and to characterize the microstructures of normal tissue and scar tissue in a quantitative manner. The scar tissue is created on in vivo rodent models and prepared for MT-stained histology slides after wound healing. A CNN model is developed, trained, and tested with various sizes of the histology images for classification and characterization. The proposed model classifies both normal tissue (i.e., without burn, as the control) and scar tissue at various scales with over 97% accuracy. The features acquired from the proposed CNN model visually characterizes the density and directional variance of the collagen fibers distributed in the dermal layers from whole histology images. The proposed deep learning technique can provide an objective and reliable method to rapidly assess and quantify wound repair and remodeling.

Original languageEnglish
Article number9486953
Pages (from-to)101755-101764
Number of pages10
JournalIEEE Access
Volume9
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Korea Medical Device Development Fund funded by the Korean government (the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, the Ministry of Health & Welfare, and the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety) (Project Number: 202016B01) and by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (2021R1A6A1A03039211).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2013 IEEE.

Keywords

  • Deep learning
  • collagen fiber characterization
  • histology image
  • scar tissue classification

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