호흡하는 살아있는 생쥐의 세엽의 3차원 X-ray

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) imaging of moving lung in live mice is highly important because lung diseases are the 3 top cause of the death. Therefore, for better understanding the study of lung disease, the study of the lung is necessary consistently. In addition, the lung diseases are closely relative to the acinus that consists of some alveoli and small ducts as the fundamental unit of lungs for respiration. However, 3-D imaging of moving lung in live mice has not been succeeded until now because the lungs should be extracted from the body in all the existing imaging methods. In these cases, the lung collapsed and damaged because the lung pressure becomes same to the air pressure. Therefore, the objective to solve the issue is to 3-D image of acinar expansion during respiration in live mice using synchrotron X-ray. The key idea is to develop the 3-D X-ray imaging protocol. The experimental method for 3-D imaging with moving sample is the same as the existing method (Chang et al., Scientific reports, 2013). The triggering from the animal ventilator signals controls the X-ray shutter, motor, and CCD camera, whereby images are acquired at the end points of expiration and inspiration during rotation of 180 degrees. By this way, the 3-D volume rendering images of live lung are visualized successfully at the end inspiration and expiration for the first time. Based on this 3-D images, the alveolar expansion decreases with alveolar size at expiration and the symmetric behavior of small ducts with generations is discovered. This results is expected to give better understanding for the expansion of lung in live mice, finally for the dynamics of lung.