Three-dimensional assessment of brain tissue morphology

Müller, Bert; Germann, Marco; Jeanmonod, Daniel; Morel, Anne

doi:10.1117/12.680312

Cited by 10 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Several approaches are known, which can be categorized into corrosion casting, [4][5][6] the vessel staining using highly X-ray absorbing species such as barium sulfate 7,8 and tissue embedding into appropriate materials such as paraffin. 9 Besides these materials science-based techniques, phase contrast tomography -a physically based method -leads to sufficient contrast for vessel segmentation. 10 Here, however, the spatial resolution has not reached the level of the smallest capillaries yet.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-resolution tomographic imaging of microvessels

Müller¹,

Lang

Dominietto

et al. 2008

SPIE Proceedings

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Cancer belongs to the primary diseases these days. Although different successful treatments including surgery, chemical, pharmacological, and radiation therapies are established, the aggressive proliferation of cancerous cells and the related formation of blood vessels has to be better understood to develop more powerful strategies against the different kinds of cancer. Angiogenesis is one of the crucial steps for the survival and metastasis formation of malignant tumors. Although therapeutic strategies attempting to inhibit these processes are being developed, the biological regulation is still unclear. This study concentrates on the three-dimensional morphology of vessels formed in a mouse tumor xenograft model post mortem. Synchrotron radiation-based micro computed tomography (SRµCT) could provide the necessary information that is essential for validating the simulations. Using mouse and human brain tissue, the different approaches to extract the vessel tree from SRµCT data are discussed. These approaches include corrosion casting, the application of contrast agents such as barium sulfate, tissue embedding, all of them regarded as materials science based. Alternatively, phase contrast tomography was used, which gave rise to promising results but still not reaches the spatial resolution to uncover the smallest capillaries.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-resolution tomographic imaging of microvessels

Müller¹,

Lang

Dominietto

et al. 2008

SPIE Proceedings

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“…While in vivo methods such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) only provide the angiogenic network indirectly because of limited spatial resolution, highly complex ex vivo techniques such as synchrotron radiation-based micro computed tomography (SRμCT) allow the direct visualization of the capillaries (Müller et al, 2006b;Plouraboué et al, 2004). For these studies, however, the absorption contrast between the vessels and the surrounding soft tissues has to be improved to allow for vessel segmentation (Müller et al, 2008), which requires staining protocols (Müller et al, 2006a;Plouraboué et al, 2004), tissue embedding (Müller et al, 2006b) or corrosion casting (Krucker et al, 2006). These procedures only work for intact vessel walls.…”

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confidence: 99%

Three-dimensional quantification of capillary networks in healthy and cancerous tissues of two mice

Lang

Müller

Dominietto

et al. 2012

Microvascular Research

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A key issue in developing strategies against diseases such as cancer is the analysis of the vessel tree in comparison to the healthy one. In the search for parameters that might be characteristic for tumor capillaries we study the vascularization in mice for cancerous and healthy tissues using synchrotron radiation-based micro computed tomography in absorption and phase contrast modes. Our investigations are based on absorption tomograms of casted healthy and cancerous tissues as well as a phase tomogram of a fixated tumor. We demonstrate how the voxel-based tomography data can be vectorized to assess the capillary networks quantitatively. The processing includes segmentation, skeletonization, and vectorization to finally extract the vessel parameters. The mean diameter of capillaries in healthy and cancerous tissues corresponds to (8.0±1.1) μm and (3.9±1.1) μm, respectively. Further evaluated parameters show marginal or no differences between capillaries in healthy and cancerous tissues, namely fractal dimension 2.3±0.3 vs. 2.3±0.2, tortuosity (SOAM) 0.18 rad/μm vs. 0.24 rad/μm and vessel length 20 μm vs. 17 μm. The bifurcation angles exhibit a narrow distribution around 115°. Furthermore, we show that phase tomography is a powerful alternative to absorption tomography of casts for the vessel visualization omitting any invasive specimen preparation procedure.

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“…Detailed morphological visualization of soft tissues at the micrometer scale is essential for functional, comparative and developmental studies 1 2 3 4 . Moreover, accurate histopathological analysis of potentially affected tissue is crucial for the investigation and treatments of diseases 5 6 .…”

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Three-dimensional non-destructive soft-tissue visualization with X-ray staining micro-tomography

Silva

Zanette

Noël

et al. 2015

Sci Rep

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Low inherent contrast in soft tissues has been limiting the use of X-ray absorption micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) to access high-resolution structural information of animal organs. The staining agents used in micro-CT to improve the contrast fail in providing high-quality images of whole organs of animals due to diffusion problems of the staining agent into the sample. We demonstrate a staining protocol that incorporates a biochemical conditioning step prior to exposure to the staining agent that succeeds in overcoming the diffusion problems, thus quickly providing high-quality micro-CT images of whole organs of mammals. Besides of yielding non-distorted three-dimensional information at the same spatial resolution accessible in histological sections, micro-CT images of whole organs stained by our method enable easy screening of slices along any direction of the volume thus demonstrating new possibilities of structural analysis in biomedical science.

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Three-dimensional assessment of brain tissue morphology

Cited by 10 publications

References 1 publication

High-resolution tomographic imaging of microvessels

High-resolution tomographic imaging of microvessels

Three-dimensional quantification of capillary networks in healthy and cancerous tissues of two mice

Three-dimensional non-destructive soft-tissue visualization with X-ray staining micro-tomography

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