Local fractal dimension of collagen detects increased spatial complexity in fibrosis

Increase of collagen content and reorganization characterizes fibrosis but quantifying the latter remains challenging. Spatially complex structures are often analyzed via the fractal dimension; however, established methods for calculating this quantity either provide a single dimension for an entire...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Histochemistry and cell biology 2024-01, Vol.161 (1), p.29-42
Main Authors: Casey, Dylan T., Lahue, Karolyn G., Mori, Vitor, Herrmann, Jacob, Hall, Joseph K., Suki, Béla, Janssen-Heininger, Yvonne M. W., Bates, Jason H. T.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biochemistry
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedicine
Cell Biology
Collagen
Developmental Biology
Fibrosis
Fractals
Humans
Medical imaging
Original Paper
Three dimensional imaging
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Increase of collagen content and reorganization characterizes fibrosis but quantifying the latter remains challenging. Spatially complex structures are often analyzed via the fractal dimension; however, established methods for calculating this quantity either provide a single dimension for an entire object or a spatially distributed dimension that only considers binary images. These neglect valuable information related to collagen density in images of fibrotic tissue. We sought to develop a fractal analysis that can be applied to 3-dimensional (3D) images of fibrotic tissue. A fractal dimension map for each image was calculated by determining a single fractal dimension for a small area surrounding each image pixel, using fiber thickness as the third dimension. We found that this local fractal dimension increased with age and with progression of fibrosis regardless of collagen content. Our new method of distributed 3D fractal analysis can thus distinguish between changes in collagen content and organization induced by fibrosis.
ISSN:0948-6143
1432-119X
DOI:10.1007/s00418-023-02248-8