基于FastSAM模型的猪肌纤维形态快速测量系统

    System for rapid measurement of muscle fiber morphology based on the FastSAM model

    • 摘要: 肌纤维形态测量对畜牧业育种和医学领域具有重要意义。传统的方法在效率和准确性方面存在局限性,需要发展先进的计算机辅助分析技术。该研究开发了一种基于FastSAM模型的肌纤维形态学测量方法,利用图像锐化裁切处理,精确和有效地分析肌纤维的特征,能够快速大批量地测定HE染色的肌纤维切片图像中的面积、直径等表型指标。结果表明:与传统方法相比,该方法在时间效率更高(单张图像平均处理耗时显著减少,P<0.01;测量精度与可靠性更强,分割 Dice 系数达 0.922,高 IoU 阈值下平均精确率(AP)为0.514、F1 分数为0.830,均优于 EdgeSAM、MobileSAM 等主流模型;与手动测量结果高度一致,相关系数 r>0.99,P<0.01。此外,该方法对猪 12 个不同骨骼区域及 30~170 kg 不同生长发育阶段的肌纤维均具有良好适应性。研究结果为猪分子育种与肉质改良、肌纤维相关疾病的病理机制研究及骨骼肌形态学量化分析标准化方案的建立提供参考。

       

      Abstract: Muscle fibers can represent the fundamental structural units of the skeletal muscle. Their morphology is closely linked to the functional performance, adaptability to mechanical stress, and quality traits in both biomedicine and agriculture. During resistance training, the skeletal muscle can experience mechanical tension, which can induce microscale damage, followed by repair and remodeling that enlarge the cross-sectional area (CSA) of the fibers. This adaptive phenomenon can often be referred to as supercompensation, thereby underlying the muscle hypertrophy, strength gains, and enhanced tolerance. In livestock science, the fiber number, CSA, and diameter are the most critical determinants of the meat quality, thus influencing the pH, tenderness, protein composition, and water-holding capacity. Smaller fibers with the lower CSA are associated with improved tenderness, whereas the enlarged fibers often reduce the meat quality. In medical research, the quantitative analysis of the fiber morphology can provide the diagnostic markers for the neuromuscular disorders, muscle atrophy, and therapeutic efficacy, with the CSA reduction serving as a hallmark of the cachexia and age-related degeneration. Hematoxylin-Eosin (HE) staining, a cost-effective and reproducible approach, can be commonly employed to visualize the fiber boundaries and morphology, particularly for the histological evaluation of the muscle fibers. However, manual or semi-automatic quantification of the fiber size and density is labor-intensive and prone to subjectivity, particularly in the high-density tissue sections. Recent advances in computer vision and deep learning have introduced segmentation models, such as Cellpose, StarDist, RetinaMask, and FeatureNet. The efficiency can be improved to maintain the high accuracy for the complex muscle structures. Segment Anything Model (SAM) has also attracted much attention for its zero-shot generalization. Yet, its computational demands have hindered the large-scale deployment. The inference speed and flexibility can also be offered using improved lightweight derivatives, such as the Fast Segment Anything Model (FastSAM), Mobile Segment Anything Model (MobileSAM), and Edge Segment Anything Model (EdgeSAM). In this study, an automated pipeline was developed to quantify the muscle fibers using FastSAM, which integrated a YOLOv8-segmentation backbone with the optimal pre- and post-processing. Pig longissimus dorsi samples were collected over the eight developmental stages, and then fixed, embedded, sectioned, and stained with HE. Images were acquired at 10× magnification using a Zeiss upright microscope. The fiber boundaries were enhanced after grayscale conversion, histogram equalization, and Laplacian sharpening. Large images were systematically cropped into the overlapping sub-regions to preserve the fiber integrity, followed by the batch inference on an NVIDIA L40 graphics processing unit. The regions obscured by background noise were removed to reconstruct the fiber boundaries. The CSA and Feret diameters (minimum, maximum, and average values) were also calculated after operation. The dataset was standardized in the COCO format to facilitate reproducibility and integration with the various platforms. An in-browser interface (which was containerized via Docker and supported by NGINX) was implemented to enable the user-friendly image upload, batch processing, visualization, and data export. A comparison was also made to evaluate the performance of the SAM, MobileSAM, and EdgeSAM. The results demonstrated that the superior performance of FastSAM was achieved with the higher Dice coefficient, precision, recall, and F1 score, while the lower inference was maintained, compared with SAM. Correlation analysis revealed that there was a strong agreement between automatic and manual measurements (r > 0.99), indicating the high reliability of the system. Twelve muscle groups were applied to highlight the high heterogeneity in the CSA and diameter distributions, indicating the functional specialization and fiber type composition. Developmental analysis over the weight stages confirmed that the progressive enlargement of the fibers was consistent with the growth physiology. In conclusion, A scalable platform was established for the biomedical diagnostics, livestock breeding, and meat quality assessment, bridging computation with the applied muscle biology. The FastSAM framework can provide a robust, efficient, and accurate solution to quantify the muscle fiber morphology in the HE-stained sections. Furthermore, the high-throughput analysis can also offer standardized outputs for the downstream research. The immunohistochemical markers and multimodal learning can be integrated to differentiate the fiber types in the future.

       

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