Journal: Scientific Reports
Article Title: Quantifying innervation facilitated by deep learning in wound healing
doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-42743-5
Figure Lengend Snippet: The experimental design and schematic depicting the methodology used to quantify skin innervation. ( A ) A biopsy punch of 8 mm in diameter is used to create the wound, and skin samples are collected and fixed on days 3, 7, 10 and 15. After fixation, the wounded tissue is paraffin-embedded and sectioned (5 μm thickness) for immunofluorescence analysis against PGP9.5 protein, a neuron-specific marker. ( B – E ) Illustration portraying different stages of wound healing. ( B ) The homeostatic phase lasts a few hours during which nerve fibers in the wound bed are damaged followed by the ( C ) inflammatory phase that can last between hours and days. ( D ) The proliferative phase lasts a few weeks during which re-innervation might be initiated and ( E ) during the remodeling phase wound matures and can last between weeks to years. In our study, we chose to quantify skin innervation at days 3, 7, 10 and 15 as an attempt to cover all phases of wound healing. ( F ) The immunohistochemistry (IHC) samples are analyzed using automated Matlab-assisted tools aided by DnCNN-based image denoising. The images were created with BioRender.com.
Article Snippet: Additionally, we have been able to find a strong correlation (R 2 = 0.926) between re-epithelization and nerve fiber density during time-series of wound healing, which not only corroborates the fact that the regeneration of nerve fibers is critical for proper wound healing in time but also validated our technique of using automated Matlab-assisted tool aided with DnCNN for denoising to precisely capture PGP9.5+ pixels, and thus calculate nerve fiber density.
Techniques: Immunofluorescence, Marker, Immunohistochemistry