A better view on living organs with ultrasound
Ultrasound is one of the most widely used imaging techniques in medicine, but up until recently it hardly played a role in imaging the tiniest structures of our bodies
A TU delft report:
Now, a team of scientists from TU Delft, the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and Caltech managed to image specifically labelled cells in 3D with ultrasound. For the first time, they imaged living cells inside whole organs across volumes the size of a sugar cube. In comparison, current light-based microscopes often require imaging of non-living samples, Baptiste Heiles, first author, says. “The sample or organ of interest has to be removed and processed, and you lose the ability to track activity of cells over time”.
The present leading technology to image how living cells behave in 3D, for example during the development of embryos, is called light sheet microscopy. This method is limited to translucent or thin specimens because light cannot penetrate deeper than 1 mm in opaque tissue. “Ultrasound can image centimetres deep in opaque mammal tissue, allowing non-invasive imaging of whole organs. This gives us information about how cells behave in their natural environment, something that light-based methods can’t do in larger, living tissues”, lead researcher David Maresca says … more
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