Meeting Abstract
As a soft-tissue imaging technique, diceCT (diffusible iodine-based contrast-enhanced computed tomography) offers outstanding opportunities for analyzing small neuroanatomical structures without requiring dissection. Recently, diceCT methods have been refined with respect to preserving, iodine-staining, and scanning neural tissue for visualization. Here, we add to the growing discussion of diceCT “best practices” by testing the efficacy of the STABILITY tissue stabilization protocol, in which samples are reinforced with hydrogel prior to iodine staining. One purported advantage of hydrogel is to limit tissue shrinkage that can occur when a specimen is exposed to high concentrations of iodine. However, infiltrating specimens with hydrogel adds substantial time and additional expenses to an experiment. Although seemingly intuitive, it is unclear if stabilization is a routinely necessary step to obtain satisfactory results. To evaluate the necessity of hydrogel stabilization, we obtained post-mortem brains of 18 juvenile Sprague Dawley rats from an unrelated drug addiction study, wherein some rats were exposed to high levels of morphine and others to a saline control. We applied the STABILITY protocol to half of the brains prior to iodine staining. Using microCT visualizations, we analyzed the two-dimensional shape of the corpus callosum at the mid-sagittal plane and found no significant differences in the structure of this brain region due to either drug treatment (p = 0.16) or tissue preservation technique (p = 0.31). These results suggest that the costs of hydrogel stabilization may not provide benefits for all neuroanatomical studies.
