engleski

Postmortem quantification of intramyocardial fat infiltration using free and open-source software

Histological and radiological studies show that adipose tissue infiltrates myocardium as intramuscular adipose tissue, however, the role and pathophysiology of such infiltration are still unclear. Our study was done on heart tissue samples from 10 male subjects who died from non-cardiac causes. Subjects were divided by age (5 younger and 5 older than 50 years). Three samples of right heart wall were analyzed for each subject (apex, ventricular free lateral wall and atrial free lateral wall). Paraformaldehyde-fixed and paraffinembedded samples were cut to 4 µm-thick slides, stained with hematoxylin and eosin and digital photographs were taken. Thickness of visible epicardium was measured using FIJI (a distribution of ImageJ software). By manual processing in GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), “masks” of different tissue areas (myocardial layer, perivascular fat tissue and non-perivascular fat tissue) were created. Masks were converted into 8-bit black and white photographs in FIJI and were then used to measure fat and muscle area. Share of total myocardial fat in apex was significantly larger than that of atrium. A tendency of increase in share of fat tissue within the myocardium is seen from the atrium towards the apex of the right heart wall. No significant differences were seen among age groups. Although further research on a larger sample is still needed, our results demonstrate that free and open-source image manipulation and bioimage analysis tools can be successfully used in quantification of intramyocardial fat infiltration.

Myocardium, Adipose tissue, Body fat distribution, Software, Image analysis

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