3D ex vivo imaging and characterization of vascular network in rodent

Your Needs:
  • Study of the impact of pathologies on the cardiac vascular network
  • Preclinical study of treatment efficacy

Our Solutions:
  • Light sheet microscopy and clearing to characterize the vascular network in 3D
  • Automated 3D image processing for microvascular network quantification

General Procedure

Prior to sample collection by Imactiv-3D:
  • In vivo labelling by infusion with a fluorescent lectin before euthanasia.
  • Formalin fixation of extracted sample
Image acquisition:
  • Sample clearing
  • 3D light sheet fluorescence microscopy
  • Multi-position acquisition
Image processing and analysis:
  • Quantitative characterization of the vascular network
    • Vessels segmentation
    • Extraction of efficient volume
    • Computation of parameters of interest: vessels length and local size, density of the vascular network
  • 3D visualization with surface and volume rendering
    • Reconstruction of the whole sample
    • Advanced display using 3D animations

Application example

  • Aim: Characterization of the microvascular network of a whole rat heart.
  • Technical specifications:
    • Whole sample acquisition using 6 to 9 fields of view
    • Raw data amounts to about 200 GB or 100 billion voxels
    • Image processing takes 14 hours using a parallel architecture
  • Analysis of the microvascular network in 33 samples following this procedure exhibited an internal variation of only 3.5 % with respect to the mean.
  • Assessment of microvascular alteration in pathological rat with comorbidities such as hypertension/diabetes (and effect of a potential treatment on vascular density).