Indian-Ink Perfusion Based Method for Reconstructing Continuous Vascular Networks in Whole Mouse Brain |
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| Authors: | Songchao Xue Hui Gong Tao Jiang Weihua Luo Yuanzheng Meng Qian Liu Shangbin Chen Anan Li |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Britton Chance Center for Biomedical Photonics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology-Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Wuhan, China.; 2. MoE Key Laboratory for Biomedical Photonics, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, |
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| Abstract: | The topology of the cerebral vasculature, which is the energy transport corridor of the brain, can be used to study cerebral circulatory pathways. Limited by the restrictions of the vascular markers and imaging methods, studies on cerebral vascular structure now mainly focus on either observation of the macro vessels in a whole brain or imaging of the micro vessels in a small region. Simultaneous vascular studies of arteries, veins and capillaries have not been achieved in the whole brain of mammals. Here, we have combined the improved gelatin-Indian ink vessel perfusion process with Micro-Optical Sectioning Tomography for imaging the vessel network of an entire mouse brain. With 17 days of work, an integral dataset for the entire cerebral vessels was acquired. The voxel resolution is 0.35×0.4×2.0 µm3 for the whole brain. Besides the observations of fine and complex vascular networks in the reconstructed slices and entire brain views, a representative continuous vascular tracking has been demonstrated in the deep thalamus. This study provided an effective method for studying the entire macro and micro vascular networks of mouse brain simultaneously. |
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