Gray Jaimi A, Gignac Paul M, Stanley Edward L
Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville, Florida, USA.
University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA.
Anat Rec (Hoboken). 2024 Mar;307(3):535-548. doi: 10.1002/ar.25282. Epub 2023 Jul 6.
Diffusible iodine-based contrast-enhanced Computed Tomography (diceCT) is now a widely used technique for imaging metazoan soft anatomy. Turtles present a particular challenge for anatomists; gross dissection is inherently destructive and irreversible, whereas their near complete shell of bony plates, covered with keratinous scutes, presents a barrier for iodine diffusion and significantly increases contrast-enhanced CT preparation time. Consequently, a complete dataset visualizing the internal soft anatomy of turtles at high resolution and in three dimensions has not yet been successfully achieved. Here we outline a novel method that augments traditional diceCT preparation with an iodine injection technique to acquire the first full body contrast-enhanced dataset for the Testudines. We show this approach to be an effective method of staining the soft tissues inside the shell. The resulting datasets were processed to produce anatomical 3D models that can be used in teaching and research. As diceCT becomes a widely employed method for nondestructively documenting the internal soft anatomy of alcohol preserved museum specimens, we hope that methods applicable to the more challenging of these, such as turtles, will contribute toward the growing stock of digital anatomy in online repositories.
基于可扩散碘的对比增强计算机断层扫描（diceCT）现在是一种广泛用于后生动物软组织解剖成像的技术。海龟给解剖学家带来了特殊的挑战；大体解剖本质上具有破坏性且不可逆转，而它们几乎完全由骨板组成的外壳覆盖着角质鳞片，这对碘的扩散形成了障碍，并显著增加了对比增强CT的准备时间。因此，尚未成功获得一个以高分辨率和三维方式可视化海龟内部软组织解剖结构的完整数据集。在这里，我们概述了一种新方法，该方法通过碘注射技术增强传统的diceCT准备工作，以获取龟鳖目动物的首个全身对比增强数据集。我们证明这种方法是对壳内软组织进行染色的有效方法。对所得数据集进行处理，以生成可用于教学和研究的解剖三维模型。随着diceCT成为一种广泛用于无损记录酒精保存的博物馆标本内部软组织解剖结构的方法，我们希望适用于其中更具挑战性的标本（如海龟）的方法，将有助于增加在线存储库中数字解剖学的存量。
