Abstract
Microglial cells are now recognized as crucial players in the development of neurodegenerative diseases. The analysis and quantification of microglia changes is necesary to better understand the contribution of microglia in neurodegenerative processes or drug treatments. However, the manual quantification of microglial cells is a time-consuming and subjective tasks; and, therefore, reliable tools that automate this process are desirable. In this paper, we present MicrogliaJ, an ImageJ macro, that can measure both the number and area of microglial cells. The automatic procedure implemented in MicrogliaJ is based on classical image processing techniques, and the results can be manually validated by experts with a simple-to-use interface. MicrogliaJ has been tested by experts and it obtains analogous results to those manually produced, but considerably reducing the time required for such analysis. Thanks to this work, the analysis of microglia images will be faster and more reliable, and this will help us to advance our understanding of the behaviour of microglial cells.
This work was partially supported by Grant PID2020-115225RB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ho, M.S.: Microglia in Parkinson’s disease. In: Verkhratsky, A., Ho, M.S., Zorec, R., Parpura, V. (eds.) Neuroglia in Neurodegenerative Diseases. AEMB, vol. 1175, pp. 335–353. Springer, Singapore (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9913-8_13
Izco, M., Blesa, J., Verona, G., Cooper, J.M., Alvarez-Erviti, L.: Glial activation precedes alpha-synuclein pathology in a mouse model of Parkinson’s disease. Neurosci. Res. 170, 330–340 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neures.2020.11.004
Khakpour, M., et al.: Manual versus automatic analysis of microglial density and distribution: a comparison in the hippocampus of healthy and lipopolysaccharide-challenged mature male mice. Micron 161, 103334 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.micron.2022.103334
Kyriazis, A.D., et al.: An end-to-end system for automatic characterization of Iba1 immunopositive microglia in whole slide imaging. Neuroinformatics 17(3), 373–389 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12021-018-9405-x
Möhle, L., Bascuñana, P., Brackhan, M., Pahnke, J.: Development of deep learning models for microglia analyses in brain tissue using DeePathology™STUDIO. J. Neurosci. Methods 364, 109371 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneumeth.2021.109371
Olanow, C., Kieburtz, K., Katz, R.: Clinical approaches to the development of a neuroprotective therapy for PD. Exp. Neurol. 298, 246–251 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.expneurol.2017.06.018
Rueden, C.T., et al.: Image J2: ImageJ for the next generation of scientific image data. BMC Bioinf. 18, 1–26 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-017-1934-z
Stetzik, L., et al.: A novel automated morphological analysis of microglia activation using a deep learning assisted model. Front. Cell. Neurosci. 16 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3389/fncel.2022.944875
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Casado-García, Á. et al. (2023). MicrogliaJ: An Automatic Tool for Microglial Cell Detection and Segmentation. In: Pertusa, A., Gallego, A.J., Sánchez, J.A., Domingues, I. (eds) Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis. IbPRIA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14062. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36616-1_47
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36616-1_47
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-36615-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-36616-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)