Three-dimensional reconstruction from digitised microscopic sections
Theme: Medical Visualisation
People: Joris van Zwieten, Charl P. Botha, Frits H. Post
Description
Recently, a collection of 2200 microscopic sections from 2 human embryos, 7 human foetuses, and 3 adult orbits was recovered at the Netherlands' Ophthalmic Research Institute and the Department of Anatomy and Embryology of the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam.
The orbit is the bony cavity that contains the eye and its appendages, i.e. the eye socket. A microscopic section is a very thin slice of tissue, laid flat on a glass slide, stained, mounted in a medium of proper refractive index and covered with a very thin piece of glass called a coverslip. The figure below shows an example of two microscopic sections of a 79mm (crown to rump) human fetus from the recovered collection.
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The collection, henceforth referred to as the orbita collection, forms the heritage of the late J.A. Los, L. Koornneef, and A.B. de Haan. The sections were created in the period between 1972 and 1986. Koornneef studied the development and the adult configuration of previously unknown connective tissue septa, or thin partitions, found within the orbital fat. De Haan studied the development of the bones that compose the orbit.
These studies were performed thirty years ago. Especially the work by Los and Koornneef has become well known among anatomists worldwide. The collection of sections itself can be considered one of the largest and most detailed studies of orbital anatomy to date.
When the sections were recovered it was noticed that the dyes used for staining had started to fade. To preserve the collection, all the sections were digitised at an optical resolution of 2500 dpi. Subsequently, 3-D volume datasets were reconstructed from the digitised sections. For the first time in thirty years, 3-D representations of the sectioned anatomy could be studied. Both the 3-D reconstructions and the original digitised section images will be made publicly available via the Internet.
Below two volume renderings of a reconstructed embryo are shown.
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Media
Publications
Joris van Zwieten, ''A literature review on the reconstruction of biological objects from microscopic sections", M.Sc. literature study, 2004
Joris van Zwieten, ''3D Reconstruction from Thirty Year Old Histological Sections'', Masters Thesis, 2005.
J. van Zwieten, C. P. Botha, B. Willekens, S. Schutte, F. H. Post, and H. J. Simonsz, ''Digital 3d reconstruction of human orbitae from high resolution serial sections'', in Proceedings of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) Annual Meeting, 2005.
J. E. van Zwieten, C. P. Botha, B. Willekens, S. Schutte, F. H. Post, and H. J. Simonsz, ''Digitisation and 3d reconstruction of 30 year old microscopic sections of human embryo, foetus and orbit'', in Image Analysis and Recognition, Proc. 3rd Intl. Conf. on Image Analysis and Recognition (ICIAR 2006) (A. Campilho and M. Kamel, eds.), vol. LNCS 4142 of Lecture Notes on Computer Science, pp. 636--647, Springer, 2006.
