OCR Text |
Show COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH ABSTRACTS Ken Monson 26 THREE-DIMENSIONAL RECONSTRUCION OF CEREBRAL VASCULATURE FOR INJURY ANALYSIS Jordan Walker (Ken Monson) Department of Bioengineering University of Utah The aim of this project was to identify characteristics of cerebral blood vessels that make them more susceptible to injury due to blast loading. This project was conceived to investigate surprising initial observations about injury distribution following a blast wave induced traumatic brain injury. Despite lateral blast exposure to the side of the animal's head, lesions appear to be symmetrically distributed throughout each section of the brain. In order to be able to characterize injury mechanisms, an accurate geometry of the damaged blood vessels is essential. Blood vessel geometry was obtained through the use of a confocal microscope as well as image reconstruction software called Amira. Coronal brain sections were obtained from Sprague-Dawley rats exposed to blast overpressure. Brain sections that were sliced 100-microns thick were stained with fluorescently-la-beled markers for ImmunoglobulinG (IgG) to visualize blood-brain barrier disruption, and Lectin to visualize blood vessels. The lesions were imaged under a confocal microscope with a 20x objective and a 0.56|im step size in the z direction. Those images were compressed into 8 bit images in Image J and imported into the Amira software for three-dimensional reconstruction. Further research is required before proper analysis can be made; however, w e hypothesize that the lesions are dependent upon vascular geometry. W e expect that the orientation of the blood vessels compared to the loading direction has a significant impact on the injury. Ongoing research is aimed at finding a systematic approach to threshold the pixel intensity of the lesions in the Amira software, as well as how to appropriately represent the tissue in its in vivo form. Walker.1: A three-dimensional reconstruction from confocal images of consecutive sections of brain tissue surrounding an injury site resulting from blast exposure. Blood vessels are identified in green, while extravasated IgG is shown in red. |