König Anya, Cavanagh Brenton L, Amado Isabel, Kalra Amit, Ogon Bohnejie A, Hinton Paige V, Kennedy Oran D
Department of Anatomy and Regenerative Medicine, Tissue Engineering Research Group (TERG) Royal College of Surgeons Ireland (RCSI) University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Dublin, Ireland.
Cellular and Molecular Imaging Core, Royal College of Surgeons Ireland (RCSI) University of Medicine and Health Sciences, Dublin, Ireland.
J Anat. 2025 May;246(5):724-731. doi: 10.1111/joa.14202. Epub 2025 Jan 17.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) musculoskeletal conditions are a leading contributor to disability worldwide. This fact is often somewhat overlooked, since musculoskeletal conditions are less likely to be associated with mortality. Nonetheless, treatments, therapies and management of these conditions are extremely costly to national healthcare systems. As with all systemic conditions, biomedical imaging of relevant tissues plays a major role in understanding the fundamental biological processes involved in musculoskeletal health. However, the skeletal system with its relatively large proportion of dense, opaque (often mineralised) tissues can often be more challenging to image, and recently important advances have been made in imaging these complex musculoskeletal tissues. Thus, we here describe a novel workflow in which recent advanced imaging techniques have been modified and optimised for use in musculoskeletal tissues (specifically bone and cartilage). This will allow for investigations, of different phases of these tissues, at new and higher resolutions. Furthermore, the process has been designed to fit with the existing and standard processes which are typically used with these samples (i.e. μCT imaging and standard histology). The additional modalities which have been included here are second harmonic generation (SHG) imaging, tissue clearing, specifically the Passive Clear Lipid-exchanged Acrylamide-hybridised Rigid Imaging Tissue hYdrogel (CLARITY) method known as PACT, and then imaging of these tissues with confocal, multiphoton and light-sheet microscopy. This paper serves to introduce a combination of existing new methods and improvements in imaging of musculoskeletal tissues.
根据世界卫生组织（WHO）的数据，肌肉骨骼疾病是全球致残的主要原因。这一事实常常在一定程度上被忽视，因为肌肉骨骼疾病与死亡率的关联较小。尽管如此，这些疾病的治疗、疗法和管理对国家医疗保健系统来说成本极高。与所有系统性疾病一样，对相关组织进行生物医学成像在理解肌肉骨骼健康所涉及的基本生物学过程中起着重要作用。然而，骨骼系统中致密、不透明（通常矿化）组织的比例相对较大，其成像往往更具挑战性，最近在对这些复杂的肌肉骨骼组织进行成像方面取得了重要进展。因此，我们在此描述一种新颖的工作流程，其中对最近的先进成像技术进行了修改和优化，以用于肌肉骨骼组织（特别是骨骼和软骨）。这将能够以新的更高分辨率对这些组织的不同阶段进行研究。此外，该流程的设计符合通常用于这些样本的现有标准流程（即μCT成像和标准组织学）。这里纳入的额外成像方式包括二次谐波产生（SHG）成像、组织透明化，特别是被称为被动清除脂质交换丙烯酰胺杂交刚性成像组织水凝胶（CLARITY）的方法（即PACT），然后用共聚焦显微镜、多光子显微镜和光片显微镜对这些组织进行成像。本文旨在介绍现有新方法的组合以及肌肉骨骼组织成像方面的改进。
