Ls. Hibbard et Dw. Mckeel, MULTISCALE DETECTION AND ANALYSIS OF THE SENILE PLAQUES OF ALZHEIMERS-DISEASE, IEEE transactions on biomedical engineering, 42(12), 1995, pp. 1218-1225
Senile plaques (SP) are one of the characteristic neuropathologic lesi
ons of Alzheimer's Disease (AD), and studies of SP cortical distributi
on, density (number of SP/mm(2)), and morphology are expected to lead
to new information about the mechanism and pathogenesis of AD, We desc
ribe a digital image analysis procedure to detect SP, and to measure S
P size, shape, and total fractional area in digital micrographs of sil
ver-stained tissue sections, This histology is nonspecific so the prog
ram detects all the significant stained objects and a classifier sorts
the SP from other tissue elements. SP vary greatly in size and form,
and detection is based on multiscale template correlation, Three indep
endent comparisons of computed versus expert-determined SP densities p
roduced correlation coefficients greater than 0.8. The program found 9
4000 SP in 2800 digital images of tissue sections from 42 postmortem c
ases including healthy aged controls and severely demented subjects.