Acta Stereologica Acta Stereologica -  Volume 10 (1991)  Number 1 - Stermat '90 (part I) - June 1991 

Quantification of drug-stimulated collagen fibrillogenesis with a granulometry algorithm based on mathematical morphology

Eeva Viljanen-Tarifa
Laboratoire de Biochimie du Tissu Conjonctif, U.A. CNRS 1174, Faculté de Médecine, Université Paris XII Val de Marne, 94010, Créteil, France
Damien Schoëvaërt
Unité de Microscopie Quantitative, Service d’Anatomie Pathologique, Centre Hospitalier de Bicêtre, 78 rue du Général Leclerc, 94270, Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France
Aitao Tang
Unité de Microscopie Quantitative, Service d’Anatomie Pathologique, Centre Hospitalier de Bicêtre, 78 rue du Général Leclerc, 94270, Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France
Alexandre Robert
Laboratoire de Biochimie du Tissu Conjonctif, U.A. CNRS 1174, Faculté de Médecine, Université Paris XII Val de Marne, 94010, Créteil, France

Abstract

Individual tropocollagen molecules of acid soluble type I collagen present a spontaneous tendency to self-aggregation. Many molecules aggregate in an ordered way to form fibrils and fibers. In “in vitro" conditions this fibrillogenesis takes place rather slowly and only to a limited extent. It was demonstrated in this work that some flavonoids and bioflavonoids are able to accelerate considerably the collagen fibril formation and in presence of some of the substances tested the size of the formed fibers is much greater than that of the fibers formed by spontaneous self-aggregation.

In such a work the exact determination of the size and the shape of the aggregates is of utmost importance. This evaluation was done with a granulometry algorithm based on mathematical morphology. The size of the particles is obtained by successive openings on a binary image obtained on thresholding or with the top-hat transformation of a digitized image. The total original surface of the particles and the remaining ones after each opening are given as well as the individual surface of each particle after labeling. The results given in this paper and some others which will be published separately, demonstrated the power of this granulometry algorithm and its usefulness for biomedical applications.

Keywords : collagen type I, fibrillogenesis, granulometry method, quantification

Pour citer cet article

Eeva Viljanen-Tarifa, Damien Schoëvaërt, Aitao Tang & Alexandre Robert, «Quantification of drug-stimulated collagen fibrillogenesis with a granulometry algorithm based on mathematical morphology», Acta Stereologica [En ligne], Volume 10 (1991), Number 1 - Stermat '90 (part I) - June 1991, 137-145 URL : https://popups.uliege.be/0351-580x/index.php?id=2130.