Morphometric approach to pulp fibroblast development in tooth germ.

This paper builds a morphometric framework for the analysis of dental pulp fibroblast evolution during tooth development. We investigated 15 tooth germs (cases) organized, by histological criteria, in three groups corresponding to cap, early bell, and late bell stages, respectively. Each group comprised five cases. The morphometric description used the following parameters: area (A), perimeter (P)--automatically extracted by a color segmentation technique, and form factor (FF)--calculated as 4πA/P (2). The designed framework operated at inter- and intragroup levels. The intergroup analysis quantified the differences between groups, in the sense of a relative distance (RD) adequately defined by mean-value scaling. We showed that the stage of early bell is approximately 5 times closer to late bell than to cap. The quantification procedure required concomitant information about A, P parameters (as P versus A dependences, or FF values), whereas the procedure failed for A or P separately used. The intragroup analysis quantified the similarity of the cases belonging to the same stage. We proved that, unlike the intergroup tests, the individual exploitation of all three descriptors A, P, and FF is effective, yielding highly compatible results. Within any group, most cases presented RDs less than 10% from the group mean value, regardless of the descriptor type.