Additional parameters for the morphometry of angiogenesis and lymphangiogenesis in corneal flat mounts.

Recently, Bock et al. (2008) proposed a semiautomatic method to quantify the angiogenesis and the lymphangiogenesis in corneal flat mounts. This model has proven suitability for unraveling the cellular and molecular mechanisms of inflammatory corneal lymphangiogenesis, as well as for evaluating the efficacy of novel drugs (Bock et al., 2007). The new method proposed by Bock et al. (2008) follows the classical steps of image analysis, i.e., image pre-processing in order to eliminate noise and enhance the contrast between the vessels and the background and then, a threshold transformation by which pixels belonging to vessels take the value of 1 (white pixels) and pixels for the background are scored 0 (black pixels). Once such a binary image is generated, Bock et al. (2008) measure automatically the area of the neovascularisation. This elegant methodology represents a great improvement as compared to the manual methods usually used to quantify the (lymph)angiogenic response observed in such murine model.