Alteration of lens and retina textures from mice embryos with folic acid deficiency: image processing analysis

Purpose: Folic acid (FA) is an essential vitamin for embryonic development. It plays particularly a critical role in RNA, DNA and protein synthesis. On the other hand, the collagen IV and laminin-1 are important proteins during embryonic development. This study was done to find if FA deficiency at a...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Sijilmassi, Ouafa, López Alonso, José Manuel, Barrio Asensio, María Del Carmen, Río Sevilla, Aurora Del
Format: article
Publication Date:2019
Country:España
Institution:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Repository:Docta Complutense
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/13062
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/13062
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:577.164.17:611.843
612.015.641.7
Folic acid deficiency
Type IV collagen
Laminin-1
Matlab texture analysis
Retina
Lens
Fisiología
Anatomía ocular
Óptica fisiológica
2411 Fisiología Humana
Description
Summary:Purpose: Folic acid (FA) is an essential vitamin for embryonic development. It plays particularly a critical role in RNA, DNA and protein synthesis. On the other hand, the collagen IV and laminin-1 are important proteins during embryonic development. This study was done to find if FA deficiency at a short and a long term in mothers could alter the tissue texture of retina and lens of the progeny. Methods: Collagen IV and laminin-1 were localized by immunohistochemistry in the lens and retina of the FA-deficient embryos. To carry out the image processing, texture segmentation was performed through canny edge detection and Fourier transform (FT). We defined a parameter, the grain size, to describe the texture of the lens and retina. A bootstrap method to estimate the distribution and confidence intervals of the mean, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis of the grain size has been developed. Results: Analysis through image processing using Matlab showed changes in the grain size between control- and FA-deficient groups in both studied molecules. Measures of texture based on FT exhibited changes in the directionality and arrangements of type IV collagen and laminin-1. Conclusions: Changes introduced by FA deficiency were visible in the short term (2 weeks) and evident in the long term (8 weeks) in both grain size and orientation of fibre structures in the tissues analysed (lens and retina). This is the first work devoted to study the effect of FA deficit in the texture of eye tissues using image processing techniques.