A whole organ serial sectioning and imaging system for correlation of pathology to computer tomography
Jessica C. Sieren, Eman Namati, Joseph M. Reinhardt, Christopher W. Piker, Ye Xu, Le Liu, Eric A. Hoffman, Geoffrey McLennan · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2004
Randomly selected pathology sections of lung tissue are used to correlate lung pathology with Computer Tomography (CT) images. The randomly selected pathology sections provide physicians with little freedom to thoroughly investigate specific areas of interest as identified via CT images. A Large Image Microscope Array (LIMA) was designed to serially section and image entire organs for direct correlation between lung pathology and CT. The LIMA consists of a novel vibratome, capable of sectioning tissue down to a thickness of 40mm at specimen dimensions of 20cm by 30cm to a total depth of 30cm. A camera and a stereomicroscope, mounted on a XYZ gantry above the vibratome is moved through an automated raster scan to capture the entire surface area of the tissue via many high magnification images. A custom software program was developed to automate all hardware components. The alignment and stitching of the images is achieved though custom C++ code in conjunction with the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK). The resulting high magnification, high-resolution pathology images are registered with corresponding CT images. Through point-to-point correlation between the two imaging techniques a pathological and CT ground truth may be established.