Morphometric analysis of human corneal endothelium by means of spatial point patterns

This paper presents a method for detecting abnormalities in spatial arrangements of cells within any tissue that can be described by different sets of relevant points. The method has been applied to the detection of subtle abnormalities in corneal endothelia. Images of this type of tissue can be characterized by two types of points: cell centroids and triple points associated with the apical intersections as it was proposed by Diaz.(7) Both types of points jointly considered are modeled using a bivariate spatial point process; then a statistical analysis based on certain distributional descriptors proposed by Doguwa(4,9) is carried out to discriminate severe and subtle abnormalities from controls. According to the results, the method constitutes a valid alternative to currently used techniques, which involve statistical descriptions of cell density, cell area and hexagonality, that fail in the detection of these subtle abnormalities.