Image acquisition protocols development

Micro-CT appears a useful tool for scanning ex vivo, fixed mouse lungs with sufficient spatial resolution and tolerable levels of noise because there are no temporal constraints on image acquisition. There are no motion artifacts or fluid shifts which can occur with in situ lung scans. Thus, for instance, it is possible to use the 9 p,m pixel resolution protocol of the Skyscan 1076 scanner. Optimized protocols for fixed mouse lung with different spatial resolutions are also being developed. The basic characteristics of the 9 fim protocol are scanning time 120 min, no filter, 50 kV and 200 p.A. 

In this section, we present the development of an automated protocol for prostate tissue histology [164] from infrared spectroscopic imaging data as an example of the techniques described (Fig. 8.11). The data is three dimensional with x-y—axes representing the image plane and the 2-axis representing the spectral dimension. After data acquisition, two important pre-processing steps, namely baseline correction and de-noising, are performed. Since the entire data set is derived from human tissue samples, the spectra have similar characteristics and, therefore, a manually chosen set of pre-defined wave number could be used as the reference points for baseline correction. It is... 

Antibodies provide a powerful tool to localize antigens in cells or tissues by immunocytochemistiy at the light or electron microscope level. The development of efficient fluorescent dyes which can be coupled to antibodies for their visualization by fluorescence microscopy has pioneered a technology which is known as immunofluorescence microscopy (IFM). IFM is easy to apply to many biological and medical questions, the protocols involved are short, and the development of sophisticated imaging equipment has even made possible the acquisition of quantitative data on the 3D distribution of several antigens in the same specimen. 

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