Chair of Biomedical Physics, Department of Physics and Munich School of BioEngineering, Technical University of Munich, 85748, Garching, Germany.
Institute of Physics, Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2017 Dec 12;7(1):17387. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-17064-z.
Chemical staining of soft-tissues can be used as a strategy to increase their low inherent contrast in X-ray absorption micro-computed tomography (micro-CT), allowing to obtain fast three-dimensional structural information of animal organs. Though some staining agents are commonly used in this context, little is known about the staining agents' ability to stain specific types of tissues; the times necessary to provide a sufficient contrast; and the effect of staining solution in distorting the tissue. Here we contribute to studies of animal organs (mouse heart and lungs) using staining combined with dual-energy micro-CT (DECT). DECT was used in order to obtain an additional quantitative measure for the amount of staining agents within the sample in 3D maps. Our results show that the two staining solutions used in this work diffuse differently in the tissues studied, the staining times of some tens of minutes already produce high-quality micro-CT images and, at the concentrations applied in this work, the staining solutions tested do not cause relevant tissue distortions. While one staining solution provides images of the general morphology of the organs, the other reveals organs' features in the order of a hundred micrometers.
软组织的化学染色可作为一种策略，增加其在 X 射线吸收微计算机断层扫描（micro-CT）中的低固有对比度，从而能够快速获得动物器官的三维结构信息。尽管在这种情况下常用一些染色剂，但对于染色剂对特定类型组织的染色能力、提供足够对比度所需的时间以及染色溶液对组织变形的影响知之甚少。在这里，我们使用结合双能 micro-CT（DECT）的染色方法对动物器官（小鼠心脏和肺脏）进行了研究。使用 DECT 是为了在 3D 图谱中获得样品中染色剂数量的额外定量测量。我们的结果表明，在本工作中使用的两种染色溶液在研究的组织中扩散方式不同，数十分钟的染色时间已经产生了高质量的 micro-CT 图像，并且在所应用的浓度下，测试的染色溶液不会引起相关的组织变形。一种染色溶液提供了器官一般形态的图像，而另一种染色溶液则以数百微米的顺序显示器官的特征。
