The correlation between extracellular resistance by electrical biopsy and the ratio of optical low staining area in irradiated intestinal tissues of rats

BACKGROUND: Electrical biopsy illustrates a tissue’s electrical properties by electrical impedance spectroscopy. However, electrical biopsy parameters are different from conventional morphological-based examinations. The correlation between electrical biopsy and the morphological observation has not been checked. Considering the tissue responses to injury, extracellular resistance should be most sensitive with the accumulation of fluid in tissue, and it is expected to increase the ratio of optical low staining area on histological images. In this study, we calculated the ratio of optical low staining area of sampled histological images and compared with the results of electrical biopsy to verify the hypothesis of that the extracellular resistance of electrical biopsy most highly correlates with the ratio of optical low staining area on histological images. METHODS: The irradiated intestinal tissues of rats after different latent period were used for study. The sampled tissues were measured by electrical impedance spectroscopy for electrical biopsy and the microscopic images were acquired. The sampled histological images were transformed into the Hue-Saturation-Density (HSD) colour model to decouple the stain density. The ratio of optical low staining area on histological images was computed to quantify the morphological changes. The results were related to the parameters from electrical biopsy according to three element circuit model by Spearman’s rank correlation test. RESULTS: The ratio of optical low staining area varied as well as the tissue’s electrical parameters. The extracellular resistance (R(e)) and intracellular resistance (R(i)) by electrical biopsy tended to increase with the ratio of low staining area decreasing. The membrane capacitance (C(m)) by electrical biopsy tended to increase with the ratio of optical low staining area increasing. The extracellular resistance (R(e)) of electrical biopsy was the parameter most highly correlated with the ratio of optical low staining area with a correlation coefficient of −0.757 (p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The results of this report confirm the hypothesis and support the idea that electrical biopsy results reflect the changes in tissues seen in conventional histological findings in a sense of conventional histological knowledge, and this approach may have a great potential for augmenting the pathological diagnosis of tissues.