Work Flow

There are around 400 miles of blood vessels in the human brain, serving our most energy-hungry organ with oxygen and nutrients. Analysing these pulsing networks, though, is a real headache. Here, researchers test a combination of techniques, known as CUBIC, on a mouse brain. First, they ‘clear’ the tissues, using a chemical cocktail to wash away opaque molecules like fats so a microscope can zoom in on the details. But flying through this series of consecutive images – we might spot something missing. Machine learning helps to ’classify’ the vessel structures, separating their faint lines from the original images, leaving us flying through a ghostly mesh of blood vessels pulled from the brain. Further computer analysis extracts features from the vessel networks that may be tell-tale indicators of changes brought by ageing or vascular disease. In the future, CUBIC may help to extract maximum information from other valuable tissue samples.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

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A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Video from work by Kei Takahashi and colleagues
• Department of Molecular Pathology, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, September 2022