New tools for the investigation of muscle fiber-type spatial distributions across histological sections

The functional and metabolic properties of skeletal muscles are partly a function of the spatial arrangement of fibers across the muscle belly. Many muscles feature a non-uniform spatial pattern of fiber types, and alterations to the arrangement can reflect age or disease and correlate with changes in muscle mass and strength. Despite the significance of this event, descriptions of spatial fiber-type distributions across a muscle section are mainly provided qualitatively, by eye. Whilst several quantitative methods have been proposed, difficulties in implementation have meant that robust statistical analysis of fiber type distributions has not yielded new insight into the biological processes that drive the age- or disease-related changes in fiber type distributions.

We review currently available approaches for analysis of data reporting fast/slow fiber type distributions on muscle sections before proposing a new method based on a generalized additive model. We compare current approaches with our new method by analysis of sections of three mouse soleus muscles that exhibit visibly different spatial fiber patterns, and we also apply our model to a dataset representing the fiber type proportions and distributions of the mouse tibialis anterior.

We highlight how current methods can lead to differing interpretations when applied to the same dataset and demonstrate how our new method is the first to permit location-based estimation of fiber-type probabilities, in turn enabling useful graphical representation.

We present an open-access online application that implements current methods as well as our new method and which aids the interpretation of a variety of statistical tools for the spatial analysis of muscle fiber distributions.