Establishment of a high-precision serial colorful slice image data set of mice

Tian Jun; Jia Yue; He Peng-fei; Guo Jue; Jin Rong-xiu; Guo Rui

doi:10.3969/j.issn.2095-4344.2017.20.010

Abstract：BACKGROUND: With the extensive application of small animal imaging and imaging studies, it requires the investigators to master the cross-sectional anatomy of mice, but the anatomy of mouse nasal cavity and sinuses cannot be obtained through vivisection.OBJECTIVE: To establish a highly precise serial colorful sectional image data set of mice using digital virtual human technology.METHODS: An adult male Balb/c mouse was killed for freezing embedded using modified Kawamoto's method and was then serially scanned at 5 μm of thickness by Leica CM3600XP cryostat microtome. The sectional images were photographed with a 24 million pixels Nikon D750 camera and stored as JPG files. All images were preliminarily registered by manually cropping the images based on the edge of block surface using software photoshop 7.0. Then, the image size, brightness and registration were corrected and adjusted, and the format of the images was unified as TIFF. The data set was imported to Amira 6.0 and was registered again with least square method. The quality of the data set was evaluated by three-dimensional reconstruction. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: A total of 6034 original images with a size of 87 GB were captured. After cropping, adjusting and registration, the final size was 184 G. The mouse three-dimensional reconstruction model was satisfactory. To conclude, the data set established using the method and system mentioned above is characterized by high resolution and high-fidelity, which might facilitate the further study of the precise anatomy of mice and other fundamental experiments.