A novel approach for quantitative assessment of mucosal damage in inflammatory bowel disease.

Aims: One of the main reliable histological features to suggest the diagnosis of inflammatory bowel disease is the presence of significant distortion of the crypt architecture indicating the chronic nature of the disease resulting in mucosal damage. This feature has a considerable intra-observer and inter-observer variability leading to significant subjectivity in colonic biopsy assessment. In this paper, we present a novel automated system to assess mucosal damage and architectural distortion in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).