Marked point process analysis of epidermal nerve fibres
Journal article, 2021

Epidermal nerve fibre (ENF) density and summed length of ENFs per epidermal surface area are reduced, and ENFs may appear more clustered within the epidermis in subjects suffering from diabetic neuropathy compared to healthy subjects. Therefore, it is important to understand the spatial behaviour of ENFs in healthy and neuropathy subjects. By using confocal microscopy data , we study the spatial structure of epidermal nerves by regarding the nerve tree locations as realizations of marked point processes . The termination points of the fibres of a nerve tree are used to define a reactive territory which is taken as a mark for the nerve tree location. We study the differences in the spatial pattern of ENFs between healthy subjects and subjects suffering from mild diabetic neuropathy by using Ripley's K function and the mark correlation function. In addition, we propose a marked sequential point process model for the nerve tree locations. Data are replicated point patterns, where we have several patterns from each subject and from each group.

coverage

replicates

mark correlation

reactive territory

marked sequential point process

Author

Farnaz Ghorbanpour

Allameh Tabatabai University

Aila Särkkä

Chalmers, Mathematical Sciences, Applied Mathematics and Statistics

University of Gothenburg

Reza Pourtaheri

Allameh Tabatabai University

Journal of Microscopy

0022-2720 (ISSN) 1365-2818 (eISSN)

Vol. 283 1 41-50

Extracting information from complicated point patterns

Swedish Research Council (VR) (2018-03986), 2019-01-01 -- 2022-12-31.

Subject Categories

Bioengineering Equipment

Bioinformatics (Computational Biology)

Physical Geography

DOI

10.1111/jmi.13006

PubMed

33788279

More information

Latest update

8/17/2021