Measurement of glomerulus diameter and Bowman's space width of renal albino rats

• Glomerulus diameter and Bowman's capsule thickness in renal microscopic images indicate various diseases.
• Detection of the renal corpuscle and related objects detection is a key step in histopathological evaluation of renal microscopic images.
• This work proposed the Analysis Particles algorithm based on median filter for morphological image processing to detect the renal corpuscle objects. Afterwards, the glomerulus diameter and Bowman's capsule thickness are measured.
• The proposed system was tested with a dataset of 21 rats’ renal corpuscle images acquired using light microscope.
• The experimental results proven that the proposed solution can detect the renal corpuscle and its objects efficiently with robustness to the deformations of the glomeruli, even in the case of glomerular hypertrophy that leads to split the bowman space.
• The results also reported significant difference between the controlled and affected groups in terms of glomerulus diameter (97.40 ± 19.02 μm and 177.03 ± 54.48 μm, respectively).

Glomerulus diameter and Bowman's space width in renal microscopic images indicate various diseases. Therefore, the detection of the renal corpuscle and related objects is a key step in histopathological evaluation of renal microscopic images. However, the task of automatic glomeruli detection is challenging due to their wide intensity variation, besides the inconsistency in terms of shape and size of the glomeruli in the renal corpuscle. Here, a novel solution is proposed which includes the Particles Analyzer technique based on median filter for morphological image processing to detect the renal corpuscle objects. Afterwards, the glomerulus diameter and Bowman's space width are measured. The solution was tested with a dataset of 21 rats’ renal corpuscle images acquired using light microscope. The experimental results proved that the proposed solution can detect the renal corpuscle and its objects efficiently. As well as, the proposed solution has the ability to manage any input images assuring its robustness to the deformations of the glomeruli even with the glomerular hypertrophy cases. Also, the results reported significant difference between the control and affected (due to ingested additional daily dose (14.6 mg) of fructose) groups in terms of glomerulus diameter (97.40 ± 19.02 μm and 177.03 ± 54.48 μm, respectively).