Assessing liver tissue fibrosis with an automatic computer morphometry system

The authors' automatic computer morphometry system effectively quantifies fibrosis of liver sections. The system provides auto-driving, auto-acquisition, image processing, and data analysis to quantitatively assess the severity of liver fibrosis. Some problems due to tissue discoloration are overcome by sample-training, The positioning subsystem, equipped with an x-y directional stage driven by two stepping motors, can properly locate the interested tissue area in the field of view of the microscope used for image acquisition. The processing subsystem coordinates all subsystems to provide automatic assessment. Additionally, the analysis procedures can effectively separate liver tissues into 3 different classes and compute the statistics of liver fibrosis. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CM score is a highly reliable indicator for the severity of liver fibrosis. Among the 3 methods evaluated here, Knodell's (1981) score is the easiest and most subjective, thereby making it prone to intra- and inter-observer errors due to variation in human observations. The colorimetric method is an alternative in assessing liver fibrosis. However, the cumbersome steps of deparaffinning and staining cause a loss of tissue during the wash procedure and generally suffer from elution error of the stained tissue. Since the tissue is destroyed, it is also impossible to reproduce the assessment parameters or even to observe the original specimens again.