Abstract
There are two types of pulmonary hypertension. One of them is primary pulmonary hypertension in which the cause is unknown, and the other is secondary pulmonary hypertension related to congenital heart disease, pulmonary thromboembolism and pulmonary fibrosis. In both cases, the prognosis is severe and various histological changes can be seen in hypertensive pulmonary arteries. Therefore their histological examination is important for the diagnosis of the pulmonary hypertension. In the field of pathology, diagnosis of biopsy materials are carried out based on the results obtained by examining the histology of autopsy materials to evaluate the grade of hypertension, and arterial hypertrophy is generally used for the evaluation. However a great amount of work is required for such analysis, since the method mainly relys on the manual operation.
In this study, a system based on the image processing technique for the quantitative measurement of the arterial hypertrophy is developed. The system is capable of extracting precise image of pulmonary arteries. Also a new method is proposed to estimate the state of the pulmonary arteries before the constriction which is caused by the postmortem decrease of the blood pressure. Using this system, we have measured the grade of the arterial hypertrophy from the hypertensive autopsy material, and obtained histologically well correlated results to the conventional knowledge of the pulmonary hypertension.
