Quantitative digital x-ray imaging of frozen hydrated and dried cryosections

Abstract

Application of quantitative x-ray imaging to frozen hydrated (FH) tissue sections has presented a number of major problems including lack of a suitable algorithm which could deal effectively with hydrated specimen mass loss from radiation damage, low characteristic x-ray signal to background signal, and lack of a suitable method which would permit analysis and comparison of the same cryosection in both hydrated and dried state. Our algorithm, using hydrated then dried cryosections, eliminates the major problems associated with analysis of FH tissue sections. This algorithm is suitable for application to quantitative x-ray imaging and will provide quantitative elemental images in both wet and dry weight units as well as quantitative images of water fractions.