Passing from morphology to function is one of the most important challenges that the biomedical community nowadays confronts. Scientists working with biological tissue are most often using visible light microscopy to inspect the samples. The passage from the classical visible light microscopy to tomographic methods should not be described as a simple change of tools. The rapid evolution and the complexity of tomographic methods, deriving from the extensive use of numerical methods and the diversity of beam lights, demands a tight collaboration between biomedical scientists, image analysts, physicists and engineers.
Biological tissues can be studied in two different conditions: ex-vivo and in-vivo, both posing peculiar issues that need to be addressed. In both cases, preservation of their structure during imaging is mandatory. Nonetheless, this is not only a problem of simple preservation of the material. In fact, this already poses an interdisciplinary problem: the interaction between the biological tissue and the type/duration of incident beam. Moreover, the evaluation of tomographic scans requires often competence in mathematical image analysis that exceed the competences of biomedical scientists. In-vivo samples pose an even higher level of challenges. They regard A) the motion of the living parts (hence the necessity of developing solutions for tracking and registering parts of the images), B) the building of different instrument set-ups with life-support for living samples, ranging from simple cell solutions to an entire animal under general anaesthesia.
Former LINXS Co-Director and Food WG 3 member, LINXS fellow
Associate professor at the Dept. of Solid Mechanics at the Faculty of Engineering (LTH), where he is also in charge of the 4D-Imaging Lab x-ray tomography facility. Came to Sweden in 2011 after moving from Laboratoire 3R in Grenoble, France.