Abstract
The acinus represents the functional unit of the mammalian lung. It is defined as the small tree of gas-exchanging airways, which is fed by the most distal purely conducting airway. Different hypotheses exist on how the fine structure of the acinus changes during ventilation and development. Since in classical 2-dimensional (2D) sections of the lung the borders of the acini are not detectable, every study of acini requires 3-dimensional (3D) datasets. As a basis for further studies of pulmonary acini we imaged rodent lungs as close to life as possible using phase contrast synchrotron radiation-based X-ray tomographic microscopy (SRXTM), and developed a protocol for the segmentation of the alveolar septa. The method is based on a combined multilevel filtering approach. Seeds are automatically defined for separate regions of tissue and airspace during each 2D filtering level and then given as input to a 3D random walk segmentation. Thus, the different types of artifacts present in the images are treated separately, taking into account the sample’s structural complexity. The proposed procedure yields high-quality 3D segmentations of acinar microstructure that can be used for a reliable morphological analysis.
Highlights
The mammalian lung is a vital organ facilitating the gas-exchange between the ambient air and the blood
In this work, we propose a novel methodology to segment 3D microstructures of fresh postmortem murine lung tissue imaged inside the closed thorax
The thin septa, as can be seen in the top middle and bottom left of figure (b) are wrongly segmented because of low contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), and their size being close to the resolution limit of the setup
Summary
The mammalian lung is a vital organ facilitating the gas-exchange between the ambient air and the blood. The gas-exchange area consists of functional units called acini which represent small trees of gas-exchanging airways. There is limited knowledge about the 3D microscopic dynamics and development of the acini, because their borders may not be recognized in classical 2D-sections. The link between microscopic observations and specific lung function is still incomplete. The connection between lung diseases and the changes in the acinar microstructure is not fully understood.
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