Good Body Image

Most treatments are targeted at a particular area, to solve an isolated problem. But no organ is an island. Researchers, therefore, are interested in ways to visualise whole-system changes as well as cell-level interactions that occur during disease and development. A new approach combines several techniques to provide a complete 3D map of the mouse vessel network (pictured, coloured according to vessel height, left, and depth under the skin, right). The researchers used light-sheet fluorescence microscopy, which shines thin sheets of light to take images in layers, a carefully timed approach to remove visual noise caused by background structures, and an algorithm to extract and analyse the vessel data. These approaches, applied with fluorescence imaging at the near-infrared wavelength of light, give a glimpse of what happens to the whole body – useful to show the details of disease development and test the broad impacts of new potential treatments.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image adapted from work by Sitong Wu, Zhichao Yang and Chenguang Ma, and colleagues
• UTS-SUSTech Joint Research Centre for Biomedical Materials & Devices, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Opto-Electronic Advances, January 2023