Temporal bones for microscopic study. I. Technique for removing temporal bones.

The increase in prostate cancer detection has induced a sharp increase in the number of radical prostatectomies Proper examination of radical prostatectomy (RP) specimens by pathologists is critical in determining the need for adjuvant treatment and prediction of patient outcome. The pathology report should include relevant clinical information as well as provide prognostically useful information derived from the macroscopic examination and microscopic evaluation of the RP specimen

Histological Techniques↗

PubMed2003

Image analysis of X-ray microtomograms of soft materials during convective drying.

X-ray microtomography is used to explore the textural evolution that soft materials undergo during a drying treatment. An original image processing algorithm is applied to vertical projections and reconstructed cross-section images in order to quantify the texture at different stages of drying. Measurements are performed both on grey-level and on binary images. It is shown that X-ray microtomography is a very promising tool in the field of drying investigations. It can be used to determine internal moisture profiles, and to follow crack development and shrinkage in an accurate and non-destructive way. This information is crucial to validate drying models. Waste-water sludges are used as test materials to assess the validity of the proposed methodology. The management of these sludges, often including a drying stage, will become a challenge in the forthcoming years in accordance with environmental regulations. Samples collected in two waste-water treatment plants are investigated. Their analysis by X-ray microtomography brings to the fore two different drying behaviours, illustrating that sludge drying is a complex unit operation very sensitive to the way the material is produced.

Histological Techniques↗

PubMed2001

Amplification of tissue by construction of tissue microarrays.

Tissue microarrays are a method of relocating tissue from conventional histologic paraffin blocks in a manner that tissue from multiple patients or blocks can be seen on the same slide. This is done by using a needle to biopsy a standard histologic section and placing the core into an array on a recipient paraffin block. This technique allows maximization of tissue resources by analysis of small core biopsies of blocks, rather than complete sections. Using this technology, a carefully planned array can be constructed using cases from pathology tissue block archives, and a 20-year survival analysis can be done on a cohort of 600 or more patients using only a few microliters of antibody in a single experiment. Furthermore, this cohort can be analyzed thousands of times with different reagents as a result of judicious sectioning of the array block. This review describes this process and discusses the issues of representative sampling in heterogeneous lesions, the issue of antigen preservation, and some technical strategies and methods of array construction. In summary, this technique can provide a highly efficient, high-throughput mechanism for evaluation of protein expression in large cohorts. It has the potential for allowing validation of new genes at a speed comparable to the rapid rate of gene discovery afforded by DNA microarrays.

Histological Techniques↗