GBM and FP width measurement pipeline for an animal model of podocytopathy

An automated pipeline for measuring Glomerular Basement Membrane (GBM) width and foot process (FP) width in Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) images for an animal model of podocytopathy.

Glomerular podocyte foot process effacement is one of the characteristics indicator proteinuria diseases. Therefore, quantifying and measuring the foot processes (FP) width as well as GBM width/length could be indicative of potential kidney diseases. This is traditionally done by manually measuring GBM thickness in TEM with ImageJ, which is time-consuming and tedious. We developed an automated pipeline for this process to improve the efficiency of the measurement. Our automated measurements could distinguish healthy from pathological kidneys on littermate mice.

Image source: A. Laudon, G. Qian, Z. Wang, J. Ye, C. Kim, K. Vijaya B., H. Joel M., W. Lu. [1-2].

The implementation of this pipeline is available on GitHub.

Abstract and results can be found in the following links (*: equal contribution):

  1. BU Bioengineering Senior Thesis Handbook 2022 [link].
  2. Aksel Laudon*, Connor Kim*, Yingzhe Qian*, Zhaoze Wang*, Ye Qin*, Vijaya B. Kolachalama, Joel M. Henderson, and Weining Lu. 2022. Computational Assessment of Glomerular Basement Membrane (GBM) Width and Podocyte Foot Process Width in An Animal Model of Podocytopathy. ASN Kidney Week Abstract. [link].