This is a CT-scanned image of the piranha Catoprion mento. The blue dyed segments inside the skeleton are fish scales eaten by the piranha (also shown enlarged next to the fish). Credit: University of Washington.
MICRO-CT NEWS, ARTICLES, AND INFORMATION
January 2018: Micro-CT Applications in Animal Studies
The following articles illustrate benefits in using micro-CT for studying animal development in fish and for measuring disease progression in rodents. Also included is an article on automating the segmentation of micro-CT scans in preclinical studies of osteoarthritis progression and treatment.
Scale-Eating Fish Adopt Clever Parasitic Methods to Survive
Biologists at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories are studying fish that feed on scales and the influences of this diet on body evolution and behavior. The researchers compared two species of piranha and two species of characin fish at different life stages, using micro-CT scanning to examine the internal anatomies. The completed scans will be part of an online library of 3D digital fish replicas, an effort pioneered by Adam Summers (co-author and professor at Friday Harbor Laboratories).
CLICK HERE to read the full article from R & D Magazine.
Longitudinal Assessment of Bleomycin-induced Lung Fibrosis by Micro-CT Correlates with Histological Evaluation in Mice
Histopathology has been the preferred method for assessing lung fibrosis in rodents but it doesn’t allow for repeated and longitudinal measurements of the disease progression. This study demonstrates the use of micro-CT to evaluate disease onset and progression at various stages in the mouse bleomycin model of lung fibrosis. The imaging results were paired with histological analysis to validate the imaging results.
CLICK HERE to read the full article from Multidisciplinary Respiratory Medicine.
Automated Assessment of Bone Changes in Cross-sectional Micro-CT Studies of Murine Experimental Osteoarthritis
Experimental models of osteoarthritis are frequently used to investigate pathogenesis, but methodologies for assessing periarticular bone morphology are limited and manual segmentation of micro-CT scans has involved time-consuming manual segmentation. The goal of this work was to use new, automated micro-CT methods to measure temporal changes in periarticular bone in murine osteoarthritis. The study shows that these automated methods are “rapid, quantitative, and highly accurate, and promise to be a useful tool in future preclinical studies of OA progression and treatment.”
CLICK HERE to read the full article from PLUS ONE.