(505f) Dermal Fibroblast Morphology and Collagen Fiber Alignment As Aging Biomarker.

Skin aging is a complex biological process that involves phenotypic changes in resident stromal cells and structural changes in extracellular matrix composition. Recent works identified dermal fibroblast cell morphology and inherent in vitro heterogeneity as biomarkers of aging. Here, we further evaluate the effect of aging in cellular/nuclear morphology in situ. We investigated the morphology of dermal reticular fibroblasts in a cohort of 119 skin tissue samples collected from caucasian donors between 13 and 92 years old (53 female & 66 male). All tissue samples are taken from the back part of the body. We developed supervised deep learning models to locate dermal fibroblasts in H&E stained skin tissues and semantically segment the cell. Our results show a positive correlation between aspect ratio of fibroblast nuclei and local collagen fiber alignment. Our study also reveals different degree of correlation with age between samples from male and female. Together, our findings suggest that dermal reticular fibroblast nuclei morphology along with its microenvironment may be used as biomarkers of aging.