Micrographic Database of cardiac extracellular matrix:

The extracellular matrix is the substrate of the cardiac muscle. This database consists of 440 samples of human hearts from three groups: healthy, with hypertension and Chagas disease, each image is presented in two forms: original (as below left) and after image processing by the technique described by Paula et al. (please put the link) where only the pixels of the extracellular matrix remain visible (right below).

All samples are stained slides of these matrices after treatment with chromium tri Masson that gives to the cell of the extracellular matrix a bluish color.

In some pictures tere are more reddish areas, like those in folder tm4296. They are the nuclei of the cells. Some images present darker parts (eg the images tm3814_08.pgn and tm3814_14.png). This is caused by muscle contraction (occurred during the process of preparation of the slice): It does not occur in all and is something that your image processing need not to be concern. There are images.presentingl has large areas of white color which has appearance of "Rivers". These are artifact caused by chemical processing, ie by the formaldehyde. This can cause a loss of 30% of the cell cluster, which causes the appearance of "rivers of white" on the slices. The level of amplification or zoom applied to all slices is the same. However, the cut direction regarding the fibers of the heart is different. This causes deformities in cell shape. In some cases the cell seem more rounded and other more stretched.

Original slice	After the image processing technique that delete all non blue pixels.

Download Database

Patients
Chagas disease	High level of blood pressure	No disease
Download original images - chagas diseade	Download original images - hypertension	Download original images - no diseade
Download segmented images - chagas diseade	Download segmented images - hypertension	Download segmented images - no diseade

Details:
TM XXXX = represent the number of the samples after Treat by Masson
H - slice belonging to patient with High level of blood pressure
C - slice belonging to patient with Chagas disease
N - slice belonging a normal person that is with no disease
Tratada = after image processing decribed in the paper