Applied Systems Biology, Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology - Hans-Knöll-Institute, Beutenbergstrasse 11a, 07745 Jena, Germany.
Cell and Molecular Biology, Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology - Hans-Knöll-Institute, Beutenbergstrasse 11a, 07745 Jena, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2017 Mar 14;7:44434. doi: 10.1038/srep44434.
The use of animal models of arthritis is a key component in the evaluation of therapeutic strategies against the human disease rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Here we present quantitative measurements of bone degradation characterised by the cortical bone profile using glucose-6-phosphate isomerase (G6PI) induced arthritis. We applied micro-computed tomography (μCT) during three arthritis experiments and one control experiment to image the metatarsals of the hind paws and to investigate the effect of experimental arthritis on their cortical bone profile. For measurements of the cortical profile we automatically identified slices that are orthogonal to individual metatarsals, thereby making the measurements independent of animal placement in the scanner. We measured the average cortical thickness index (CTI) of the metatarsals, as well as the thickness changes along the metatarsal. In this study we introduced the cortical thickness gradient (CTG) as a new measure and we investigated how arthritis affects this measure. We found that in general both CTI and CTG are able to quantify arthritic progression, whilst CTG was found to be the more sensitive measure.
关节炎动物模型的使用是评估针对人类疾病类风湿关节炎（RA）的治疗策略的关键组成部分。在这里，我们提出了使用葡萄糖-6-磷酸异构酶（G6PI）诱导关节炎来描述皮质骨轮廓的骨降解的定量测量。我们在三个关节炎实验和一个对照实验中应用了微计算机断层扫描（μCT）来对后足的跖骨成像，并研究了实验性关节炎对其皮质骨轮廓的影响。为了进行皮质轮廓的测量，我们自动识别了与各个跖骨正交的切片，从而使测量结果不依赖于动物在扫描仪中的放置位置。我们测量了跖骨的平均皮质厚度指数（CTI），以及沿跖骨的厚度变化。在这项研究中，我们引入了皮质厚度梯度（CTG）作为一种新的测量方法，并研究了关节炎如何影响这一测量方法。我们发现，一般来说，CTI 和 CTG 都能够定量关节炎的进展，而 CTG 被发现是更敏感的测量方法。
