Step down Vascular Calcification Analysis using State-of-the-Art Nanoanalysis Techniques.

New insights into the architecture and formation mechanisms of calcific lesions down to the nanoscale open a better understanding of atherosclerosis and its pathogenesis. Scanning electron - and atomic force microscope based nano-analytical characterization techniques were adapted to the assessment of an ex-vivo calcified coronary artery. Human atherosclerotic tissue and bone tissue reside a typical chemistry of Magnesium and Sodium rich Calcium phosphates, identified as whitlockite and Calcium apatite, respectively.

Development and evaluation of a device for simultaneous uniaxial compression and optical imaging of cartilage samples in vitro.

In this paper, we present a system that allows imaging of cartilage tissue via optical coherence tomography (OCT) during controlled uniaxial unconfined compression of cylindrical osteochondral cores in vitro. We describe the system design and conduct a static and dynamic performance analysis. While reference measurements yield a full scale maximum deviation of 0.

Comparison of different metrics for analysis and visualization in spectroscopic optical coherence tomography.

Spectroscopic Optical Coherence Tomography (S-OCT) extracts depth resolved spectra that are inherently available from OCT signals. The back scattered spectra contain useful functional information regarding the sample, since the light is altered by wavelength dependent absorption and scattering caused by chromophores and structures of the sample. Two aspects dominate the performance of S-OCT: (1) the spectral analysis processing method used to obtain the spatially-resolved spectroscopic information and (2) the metrics used to visualize and interpret relevant sample features.