Study On Morphology And Structure Of Neurons In AD Mice Based On Micro-optical Sectioning Tomography

In spite of the rapid development of science and technology,the nervous system of human is still the most sophisticated functional system,which is based on billions of neurons,the basic structure of brains.At present,due to technical limitations,the subtle changes in neuronal morphology still remained the lack of understanding in the development of Alzheimer’s disease(Alzheimer ’s disease,AD).Various types of neurons in the brain are connected with each other into a network,so that the whole brain is integrated into a complex system,and all parts work together.In order to study the morphological changes of neurons in the lesions,it’s necessary to get large-scale and precise neural network information,which has always been a major challenge in neuroscience community.With such technique,we can study the morphological difference of neurons between normal and AD mice.In this paper,the whole brain of three transgenic AD model mice(3×Tg AD mice)were examing by Golgi staining.Sections of whole brain were scanned by MOST technique.For the first time,the whole brain atlas of AD was obtained at the cellular level.We obtained image data of as much as 1TB per mouse,and reconstructed three dimension model of the data.The geometric distribution of neurons was constructed for three-dimensional display.Information of hundreds of neurons was tracked to extract reconstructed information.Cluster analysis,dendritic analysis and Sholl analysis were used to analyze the development and pathological changes of brain neurons in AD mice.In order to obtain the neuron data,we need to isolate the morphological information of neurons from the image pixels.So far the Amira software was used to semi-automatic neurons tracking method.However,it requires a lot of human participate in this method.Tracking a neuron need at least half an hour,and each mouse has more than ten million neurons.In the current literature reports,the existing algorithms can not track neurons of complex image data effectively.In order to achieve a more effective tracking method for complex data,our paper proposed an improved scheme based on the Open Snake tracking algorithm,and used the C++ language to implement algorithm and 3D display.The results show that alzheimer’s disease affect different brain regions of mice in different ways,and the CA1 area of hippocampus was most vulnerable to it.The fiber content of the neurons increased with age.But the increase of the diseased mice was markedly slower than that of normal mice,which indicated that AD could slow down the growth of neurons.Our results and methods provide important theoretical basis for the study of AD.