Pattern quantification from human skin fibroblast images: Image quantification for fibroblast chracterization

Collagen plays an important role in maintaining healthy structures in human skin. Fibroblasts are the cells located in collagen-rich skin dermis and they are responsible for producing collagen of connective tissue. However, the effects of coating of the culture dish with collagen on fibroblast culture are still unknown. Therefore, to uncover the effects, we propose a quantitative method based on Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix. This method computes two texture similarity indices, called "Texture Mean Distance (TMD)" and "Texture Mean Spread (TMS)" by integrating texture features from images. An experiment with two sets of microscope cell culture images with and without collagen coating demonstrates promising performances of the metrics to identify the effects of collagen on human fibroblasts.