A team of researchers from Göttingen has successfully applied a special variant of X-ray imaging to brain tissue. With the combination of high-resolution measurements at DESY’s X-ray light source PETRA III and data from a laboratory X-ray source, Tim Salditt’s group from the Institute of X-ray Physics at the Georg August University of Göttingen was able to visualize about 1.8 million nerve cells in the cerebellar cortex. The researchers describe the investigations with the so-called phase contrast tomography in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The human cerebellum contains about 80 percent of all nerve cells in 10 percent of the brain volume – one cubic millimeter can therefore contain more than one million nerve cells. These process signals that mainly control learned and unconscious movement sequences. However, their exact positions and neighbourhood relationships are largely unknown. “Tomography in the so-called phase contrast mode and subsequent automated image processing enables the cells to be located and displayed in their exact position,” explains Mareike Töpperwien from the Institute of X-ray Physics at the University of Göttingen, lead author of the publication.
>Read more on the PETRA III at DESY website
Image: Result of the phase contrast X-ray tomography at DESY’s X-ray source PETRA III.
Credit: Töpperwien et al., Universität Göttingen