*4.3. Morphometric Analysis*

After digitizing the images acquired at 10× magnification from HE stained sections, images were converted to binary images (black-white) for the elaboration with a Programming Language Software (Matlab R2018b, The MathWorks, Inc., Natick, MA, USA). A specific procedure was adopted to identify the boundary of the adipocytes, considering the connected regions of similar intensity in the grayscale images [20,30,41]. The white regions represent the adipocytes and the black region, the boundary.

In each image, adipocytes were approximated to ellipses, and areas and major/minor axes were calculated. A count of the number of adipocytes for each image was calculated.
