Quantitative analysis of rabbit coronary atherosclerosis. Practical techniques utilizing open-source software.

Objective: Coronary atherosclerosis is widely recognized as a major cause of sudden cardiac death, acute myocardial infarction, and unstable angina pectoris. However, the techniques for quantitative analysis of coronary atherosclerosis have not been standardized and there is still a need for reduction in inaccuracies.

Study design: This study reports a series of practical techniques to quantitatively analyze microscopic lesions of coronary atherosclerosis in myocardial infarction-prone Watanabe heritable hyperlipidemic rabbits. First, we applied the stenosis to evaluate the severity of coronary atherosclerosis, which was based on a comprehensive analysis of 7 blocks in each rabbit heart. Then, by splitting the RGB image to monochrome image and the setting Gray Threshold, cellular components were quantified by maximal separation from background tissue; all of these works were based on ImageJ software.

Results: Blocks I, II, and V had the most severe coronary atherosclerosis, and the numbers of macrophages and smooth muscle cells in atherosclerotic lesions were accurately calculated as well.

Conclusion: We introduced a quantitative analysis to study microscopic lesions of the coronary atherosclerosis, which. may be widely applied in various animal models.