Simple light trick reveals hidden brain pathways in microscopic detail

 



Many diseases disrupt these delicate networks. In the brain, damage to fiber connections appears across nearly all neurological disorders, where it contributes to changes in neural communication.

Although these microscopic structures play essential roles, they have long been challenging to study. Researchers have struggled to determine how fibers are oriented inside tissues, which has made it difficult to fully understand how they change in health and disease.

A Simple Method for Revealing Hidden Microstructure

A research team led by Marios Georgiadis, PhD, instructor of neuroimaging, has now introduced an approach that makes these hard-to-see fiber patterns visible with exceptional clarity and at a relatively low cost.

Their technique, described in Nature Communications, is known as computational scattered light imaging (ComSLI). It can reveal the orientation and organization of tissue fibers at micrometer resolution on virtually any histology slide, regardless of how it was stained or preserved -- even if the slide is many decades old.

Michael Zeineh, MD, PhD, professor of radiology, served as co-senior author with Miriam Menzel, PhD, a former visiting scholar in Zeineh's laboratory.


"The information about tissue structures has always been there, hidden in plain sight," Georgiadis said. "ComSLI simply gives us a way to see that information and map it out."

How ComSLI Maps Fiber Orientation

Traditional imaging strategies come with significant limitations. MRI can highlight large anatomical networks but cannot capture tiny cellular structures. Histology techniques often require specialized stains, high-end equipment and carefully preserved samples, and they still struggle to depict fiber crossings clearly.

ComSLI relies on a basic physical principle: when light encounters microscopic structures, it scatters in different directions based on their orientation. By rotating the light source and recording how the scattering signal changes, researchers can reconstruct the direction of the fibers within each pixel of an image.

The method requires only a rotating LED light and a microscope camera, making the setup accessible compared with other forms of advanced microscopy. After the images are collected, software analyzes delicate patterns in the scattered light to generate color-coded maps of fiber orientation and density, known as microstructure-informed fiber orientation distributions.

#Neuroscience
#BrainImaging
#Microscopy
#OpticsInnovation
#NeuroTech
#ScientificDiscovery
#LightScience
#BrainResearch
#Microstructure
#ScienceNews


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