AsianScientist (Sep. 21, 2017) – Scientists in Japan have developed a method to make human organs transparent, thus improving the accuracy of disease diagnosis. They report their findings in the journal Scientific Reports.
Contemporary methods for diagnosing diseases are based on staining techniques from the 19th Century. Patient specimens are cut into thin sections that are stained and analyzed individually under a microscope. However, this method has limitations in its relatively narrow range of observation area and in its two-dimensionality.
“Traditionally, pathological diagnosis is made by taking 2D sections of a specimen resected from patients. It is effective, but we cannot exclude the possibility that important findings away from the cut surface are overlooked,” said Professor Eiichi Morii of Osaka University.
CUBIC (Clear, Unobstructed Brain/Body Imaging Cocktails and Computational Analysis) was first reported by RIKEN Group Director, Professor Hiroki R. Ueda, who is the corresponding author of this study, and his colleagues three years ago. CUBIC uses a clearing agent to make tissues and organs transparent for 3D imaging. It has been used to observe whole organs mainly from experimental animals.
In this study, Ueda and his colleagues demonstrated that CUBIC can be used to observe organs from humans and that it surpasses current methods for diagnosis. The researchers performed 3D imaging of patient lung and lymph node tissues made transparent using the CUBIC method, which clearly delineated normal and abnormal regions. Importantly, they showed that the combination of appropriate deparaffinization and CUBIC enabled 3D imaging of older specimens archived in hospitals.
“These results mean that we can use not only newly fixed samples, but also paraffin-embedded tissues stored in the pathological archives of hospitals,” said Assistant Professor Satoshi Nojima of Osaka University, the first author of the study.
The scientists also examined the practical diagnostic potential of CUBIC, reporting that the CUBIC method enabled more accurate detection of metastatic carcinomas in lymph node specimens compared to standard pathology techniques.
“This is an outstanding result which showcases the usefulness of CUBIC on practical clinical examination,” said Nojima.
These findings show the potential of CUBIC for retrospective and prospective clinicopathological diagnosis.
“Our wish is to improve CUBIC so that it leads to the establishment of a novel field of medical science based on 3D histopathology,” Ueda said.
The article can be found at: Nojima et al. (2017) CUBIC Pathology: Three-dimensional Imaging for Pathological Diagnosis.
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Source: Osaka University; Photo: Shutterstock.
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