REAVER: A program for improved analysis of high-resolution vascular network images
Bruce A Corliss1, Richard W Doty1, Corbin Mathews1
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.
Microcirculation (New York, N.Y. : 1994)
|March 17, 2020
Summary
REAVER is a new open-source software tool that accurately analyzes blood vessel networks in 2D images. It precisely quantifies vessel architecture, aiding research into diseases and healing processes.
Area of Science:
- Vascular biology
- Bioimage analysis
- Quantitative pathology
Background:
- Vascular network alterations are crucial in disease, wound healing, and development.
- Accurate quantification of vessel architecture requires specialized software and metrics.
- Existing tools may lack the necessary throughput, accuracy, or unbiased analysis.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce REAVER (Rapid Editable Analysis of Vessel Elements Routine), an open-source software for analyzing 2D fluorescent images of blood vessel networks.
- To evaluate REAVER's performance against alternative image analysis programs.
- To demonstrate REAVER's utility in quantifying vessel architecture differences under various experimental conditions.
Main Methods:
- Development of REAVER, an open-source software tool for analyzing 2D fluorescent images of vascular networks.
- Comparison of REAVER's performance against existing image analysis software using a ground-truth dataset of manually analyzed murine tissue images.
- Quantification of key vessel architecture metrics: vessel length density, vessel area fraction, mean vessel diameter, and branchpoint count.
- Assessment of pixel-by-pixel segmentation accuracy.
Main Results:
- REAVER demonstrated high accuracy and precision in quantifying all assessed vessel architecture metrics.
- REAVER achieved superior pixel-by-pixel accuracy for blood vessel network segmentation compared to alternatives.
- Combining manual curation with REAVER's automated analysis further improved metric accuracy when automated segmentation was suboptimal.
- REAVER effectively quantified differences in blood vessel architectures.
Conclusions:
- REAVER is a high-accuracy, open-source tool for the quantitative analysis of 2D vascular networks.
- The software aids researchers in unbiased, high-throughput analysis of vessel architecture.
- REAVER is valuable for experiments investigating the impact of perturbations like drugs or disease states on vascular networks.
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