Below is a cross section of mouse heart stained with sirius red which stains positively for fibrosis.  Interwoven trabeculae of positively staining fibrous connective tissue (see insert) are visible within the ventricular myocardium as a result of  experimental damage.  With this mouse heart fibrosis model, it would be desirable to measure area of fibrosis as a percent of heart cross-sectional area, and thus determine potential treatment effect in an efficacy study.   Precision in the level of histologic sectioning is required for accurately comparing amounts of fibrosis between treatment groups.  A simple and robust positive pixel count algorithm is sufficient for establishing accurate area based measurement in this case.

Myocardial fibrosis in the mouse can be reliably measured with an area-based tool