High-resolution tomographic imaging of microvessels

Cancer belongs to the primary diseases these days. Although different successful treatments including surgery, chemical, pharmacological, and radiation therapies are established, the aggressive proliferation of cancerous cells and the related formation of blood vessels has to be better understood to develop more powerful strategies against the different kinds of cancer. Angiogenesis is one of the crucial steps for the survival and metastasis formation of malignant tumors. Although therapeutic strategies attempting to inhibit these processes are being developed, the biological regulation is still unclear. This study concentrates on the three-dimensional morphology of vessels formed in a mouse tumor xenograft model post mortem. Synchrotron radiation-based micro computed tomography (SRμCT) could provide the necessary information that is essential for validating the simulations. Using mouse and human brain tissue, the different approaches to extract the vessel tree from SRμCT data are discussed. These approaches include corrosion casting, the application of contrast agents such as barium sulfate, tissue embedding, all of them regarded as materials science based. Alternatively, phase contrast tomography was used, which gave rise to promising results but still not reaches the spatial resolution to uncover the smallest capillaries.