Purpose: Synchrotron radiation-based tomography yields microanatomical features in human and animal tissues without physical slicing. Recent advances in instrumentation have made laboratory-based phase tomography feasible. We compared the performance of three cutting-edge laboratory systems benchmarked by synchrotron radiation-based tomography for three specimens. As an additional criterion, the user-friendliness of the three microtomography systems was considered.
Approach: The three tomography systems—SkyScan 2214 (Bruker-microCT, Kontich, Belgium), Exciscope prototype (Stockholm, Sweden), and Xradia 620 Versa (Zeiss, Oberkochen, Germany)—were given 36 h to measure three medically relevant specimens, namely, zebrafish larva, archaeological human tooth, and porcine nerve. The obtained datasets were registered to the benchmark synchrotron radiation-based tomography from the same specimens and selected ones to the SkyScan 1275 and phoenix nanotom m® laboratory systems to characterize development over the last decade.
Results: Next-generation laboratory-based microtomography almost reached the quality achieved by synchrotron-radiation facilities with respect to spatial and density resolution, as indicated by the visualization of the medically relevant microanatomical features. The SkyScan 2214 system and the Exciscope prototype demonstrated the complementarity of phase information by imaging the eyes of the zebrafish larva. The 3-μm thin annual layers in the tooth cementum were identified using Xradia 620 Versa.
Conclusions: SkyScan 2214 was the simplest system and was well-suited to visualizing the wealth of anatomical features in the zebrafish larva. Data from the Exciscope prototype with the high photon flux from the liquid metal source showed the spiral nature of the myelin sheaths in the porcine nerve. Xradia 620 Versa, with detector optics as typically installed for synchrotron tomography beamlines, enabled the three-dimensional visualization of the zebrafish larva with comparable quality to the synchrotron data and the annual layers in the tooth cementum.
Inline phase tomography using synchrotron radiation with sub-micrometer voxel sizes is nowadays the gold standard for investigation of soft and hard tissues with micron resolution. Recent developments on detectors and X-ray sources allow the transfer of the technique into laboratory environment. For the comparison of three manufacturers, we performed microtomography with advanced laboratory microtomography devices with micron resolution on a porcine nerve, a zebrafish embryo and a historic human tooth. These data sets were also compared with data acquired at the ANATOMIX beamline at Synchrotron Soleil and the TOMCAT beamline at SLS. For the lab-based experiments following scanners were chosen: Skyscan 2214 (Bruker-microCT, Kontich, Belgium), Xradia 620 Versa (Zeiss, Oberkochen, Germany) and a prototype with a MetalJet X-ray source from Exillum from the company Exciscope (Stockholm, Sweden). All devices contained detectors including X-ray optics.
Formalin fixation and paraffin embedding of post mortem tissue specimens is widely used for high-resolution neuroimaging with both conventional and X-ray virtual histology. Exchange of embedding solutions generates non-uniform brain shrinkage and changes relative tissue densities. We used synchrotron radiation-based X-ray micro computed tomography to visualize the embedding process for a single mouse brain. Non-rigid registration was employed to determine the volumetric strain fields and to track the X-ray absorption changes of corresponding features. This allows for a correction of the observed microanatomy to improve the anatomical context. Through embedding, the entire brain shrinks to around 40% of its volume in formalin. Shrinkage is non-uniform and varies over anatomical regions and the distance to external surfaces.
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