Development of 3-D chromatin texture analysis

The aim of the study described in this Chapter was to develop and implement 3-D texture features that quantitatively describe the nuclear chromatin distribution. Thirty-five features thoughtfully chosen from 4 categories of 3-D texture features (discrete texture features, Markovian features, fractal features, grey value distribution features) were selected and tested for invariance properties (rotation and scaling) using artificial images with a known grey value distribution. The discriminative power of the 3-D texture features was tested on artificially constructed benign and malignant 3-D nuclei with increasing nucleolar size and advancing chromatin margination towards the periphery of the nucleus. 10 Benign and 10 malignant human prostate nuclei were acquired by CLSM to evaluate whether there was more texture information present in 3-D whole nuclei compared to a single 2-D plane from the middle of the nucleus. A set of 35 3-D nuclear texture features was used successfully to assess nuclear chromatin patterns in 3-D images obtained by confocal laser scanning microscopy. André Huisman (2006) 3-D Nuclear chromatin texture analysis using confocal laser scanning microscopy