Research Article Reproducibility in Nerve Morphometry: Comparison between Methods and among Observers

Copyright © 2013 Antônio Paulo da Costa Bilego Neto et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We investigated the reproducibility of a semiautomated method (computerized with manual intervention) for nerve morphometry (counting and measuring myelinated fibers) between three observers with different levels of expertise and experience with the method. Comparisons between automatic (fully computerized) and semiautomatedmorphometricmethods performed by the same computer software using the same nerve images were also performed. Sural nerves of normal adult rats were used. Automatic and semiautomated morphometry of the myelinated fibers were made through the computer software KS-400. Semiautomated morphometry was conducted by three independent observers on the same images, using the semiautomated method. Automatic morphometry overestimated the myelin sheath area, thus overestimating the myelinated fiber size and underestimating the axon size. Fiber distributions overestimation was of 0.