Project: Investigation of Orientation & Order of collagen fibers through pSHG or SHG microscopy technique

The role of fibrillar collagen in the tissue microenvironment is critical for understanding various disease processes, including cancers and chronic inflammations. Numerous studies have highlighted the importance of quantifying fibrillar collagen organization to characterize the topology of collagen fibers and their involvement in disease progression. This research project focuses on implementing advanced image and video processing methods to extract structural and functional information from collagen fibrils in stromal cornea tissue and breast tissue, using pSHG (polarization-sensitive second harmonic generation) or SHG (second harmonic generation) microscopy techniques. The interdisciplinary team of researchers will contribute their expertise in ophthalmology, ex vivo corneal tissue processing, image/video processing, and artificial intelligence techniques. The primary objective is to develop metrics to quantify the orientation, alignment, and spatial correlation of collagen fibrils based on image/video analysis. We will achieve this by extracting collagen fiber orientation using three distinct methodologies: - pSHG Information Analysis: Utilizing the polarization-sensitive second harmonic generation data from the acquired images. - Structural Tensor Approach: Applying the structural tensor method to analyze fiber orientation. - Deep Neural Network Training: Employing a deep neural network to learn and predict fiber orientation from the imaging data. Subsequently, we will introduce different analysis methods based or on the collagen orientation or directly on the images to retrieve structural and spatial information. At the end we create synthetic collagen fibril data to validate and test the effectiveness of the developed analysis models.