Traditionally, visually identifying muscle nuclei and manually measuring the muscle fiber size manual tracing of individual fibers are relatively subjective and time consuming. However, the methods to quantify these changes remain challenging among investigators and often require painstaking manual procedures. ![]() Examination of muscle cross-sections is therefore often carried out to assess such changes in the fields of myopathy and rehabilitation science. In genetic myopathies such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a fatal X-linked recessive muscle disease caused by genetic mutations leading to the loss of dystrophin, repeated cycles of muscle injury, and repair result in increased variation of fiber size and muscle fibers with central nuclei. Upon injuries, satellite cells associated with skeletal muscle are activated to proliferate, fuse to form myotubes, and eventually regenerate new muscle fibers. During endurance exercise, skeletal muscle undergoes extensive adaptation by changing their fiber type composition and fiber size. Skeletal muscle is an exceptionally adaptive tissue. Our data indicate that the MuscleAnalyzer pipeline can efficiently and accurately analyze laminin and DAPI co-stained muscle images in a batch format and provide quantitative measurements for muscle histological properties such as muscle fiber diameters, fiber size distribution, and CNF percentage. Moreover, the MuscleAnalyzer pipeline also provided the measurement of the cross-sectional area (CSA) and minimal Feret’s diameter (MFD) of muscle fibers, and thus fiber size distribution can be plotted. However, for a total of 67 images, CellProfiler completed the analysis in ~ 10 min on a regular PC while it took an investigator ~ 3 h using the manual approach in order to quantify the number of muscle fibers and CNF. The immunofluorescence images analyzed using the MuscleAnalyzer pipeline or manually yielded similar results in the number of muscle fibers per image ( p = 0.42) and central nucleated fiber (CNF) percentage ( p = 0.29) in mdx mice. This pipeline was evaluated using wild-type and mdx muscle sections co-stained with laminin (to demarcate the muscle fiber boundaries) and 4′,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole (DAPI, to label the nuclei). The MuscleAnalyzer pipeline consists of loading, adjusting, and running a series of image-processing modules provided by CellProfiler. ![]() Here, we describe a customized pipeline termed MuscleAnalyzer for muscle histology analysis based upon CellProfiler, a free, open-source software for measuring and analyzing cell images. Computational programs designed to obtain these parameters would greatly facilitate such efforts and offer significant advantage over manual image analysis, which is very labor-intensive and often subjective. These parameters offer insights into the dynamic adaptation of skeletal muscle cells during repeated cycles of degeneration and regeneration associated with many muscle diseases and injuries. Quantifiable measures of skeletal muscle often include mean fiber diameter, fiber size distribution, and centrally nucleated muscle fibers. Histological assessment of skeletal muscle sections is important for the research of muscle physiology and diseases.
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