This New 3D Imaging Technique Depictures Blood Vessels

With the newly developed 3D visualization technique, the functioning of blood vessels is seen much more clearly. The technique, called VascuViz, uses a fast-curing polymer blend that makes blood vessels visible through a wide variety of scanning technologies as they move between tissues and organs.

So far, laboratory mouse tests show that it works at different scales, from the largest arteries to the smallest capillaries, and can be used to show details that would be missed by traditional techniques and improve our understanding of how tissues work.

New technique in researching blood vessels

“Now, instead of using an estimate, we can more precisely predict features like blood flow in real blood vessels and combine them with complementary information like cell density,” said mechanical engineer Akanksha Bhargava of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

With the measurements taken with VaskuViz, simulation models can be created that show how blood flow is, including cancer models, and a crucial advance can be made in understanding how such patients work.

What makes the new technique so useful is that it offers an all-in-one approach to results that would normally require several scans and several different methods to obtain.

“Usually, if you want to collect data about blood vessels in a particular tissue and combine it with all the surrounding context, such as the structure and the types of cells that grow there, you have to relabel the tissue several times, get multiple images and pieces of supplemental information together,” said Arvind Pathak, Associate Professor of Radiology and Oncology at the University of Medicine of John Hopkins. “This can be an expensive and time-consuming process that risks destroying tissue architecture and hampers our ability to use composite information in new ways.”

The VascuViz technique combines imaging modalities such as BriteVu (used in CT scans) and Galbumin-Rhodamine (used in MRI scans). What is thus produced is a wonderfully detailed, three-dimensional model of the blood vessel location.

The team behind the project said that cancer tumors, leg muscles, brain, kidney tissues, and the circulatory system can all be imaged by VascuViz. So the potential of this new approach is very high.

“We hope that these advances in preclinical vascular imaging, along with the new visualization approaches presented here, will open new perspectives for the image-based systems biology of the vasculature and help answer important questions in the broader field of microcirculation in health and disease,” the team wrote.

The research has been published in Nature Methods.