Work

Interpretable computational SHG microscopy enables quantitative tissue phenotyping of cardiac remodeling in nonischemic heart failure

Year: 2026

Type: preprint

Abstract: Heart failure is characterized by extracellular matrix remodeling and collagen deposition that impair myocardial function. Second harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy provides label-free visualization of fibrillar collagen and myosin but lacks standardized, interpretable, and quantitative frameworks with clinical-level performance. We present a feature extraction pipeline integrating 87 biologically interpretable SHG-derived metrics for automated classification of nonischemic heart failure in murine specimen. The framework distinguished normal, heart failure, and natural recovery states with area-under-the-curve values of 0.84-0.99, outperforming established open-source SHG feature extraction tools. These findings support interpretable, SHG-based quantification of cardiac remodeling and establish a methodology for future multimodal biophotonics applications.

Source: bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)

DOI: 10.64898/2026.10.21.760498