A standardized Method to Automatically Segment Amyloid Plaques in Congo Red Stained Sections from Alzheimer Transgenic Mice

Automated detection of amyloid plaques (AP) in post mortem brain sections of patients with Alzheimer disease (AD) or in mouse models of the disease is a major issue to improve quantitative, standardized and accurate assessment of neuropathological lesions as well as of their modulation by treatment. We propose a new segmentation method to automatically detect amyloid plaques in Congo Red stained sections based on adaptive thresholds and a dedicated amyloid plaque/tissue modelling. A set of histological sections focusing on anatomical structures was used to validate the method in comparison to expert segmentation.