Geropathology Imaging - Part of the The Jackson Laboratory Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging

Geropathology is the study of aging and age related diseases in the form of whole necropsies/autopsies, surgical biopsies, histology, and molecular biomarkers, and as such, is a subspecialty of geriatrics, anatomic pathology, molecular pathology, and gerontology (https://www.geropathology.org/).

The Image Analysis Core of The Jackson Laboratory’s Nathan Shock Center is developing tools for quantitative image analysis of geropathology in the mouse with the goal to make them user-friendly and easy to adapt and implement by scientist in the geroscience field. We hope this website is a useful tool to share the knowledge and know-how of applying machine learning tools to images derived from aging studies.

Our tools will be applicable to different mouse tissues but are initially developed for the kidney. The kidney is an organ with noticeable age-related changes in structure and function at a relatively early age. Using image analysis and machine learning approaches, we developed a high-throughput classifier that can be used to assess biological age and the effect of interventions. 

We plan to develop aging classifiers for other tissues (e.g. liver, lung, and heart) in the near future and share our tools as they are developed. We are also applying our tools to more diverse and larger sets of samples and refining our ability to quantify and localize aging within and between tissues such that we can understand the mechanisms that change spatially and structurally with age.