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Updated: Sep 25, 2025
Generation and 3-Dimensional Quantitation of Arterial Lesions in Mice Using Optical Projection Tomography
Published on: May 26, 2015
Label-free analytic histology of carotid atherosclerosis by mid-infrared optoacoustic microscopy
Mirjam Visscher1, Miguel A Pleitez2,3, Kim Van Gaalen1
1Department of Cardiology, Erasmus MC University Medical Center Rotterdam, PO Box 2040, 3000 CA Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Background And Aims:
Analysis of atherosclerotic plaque composition is a vital tool for unraveling the pathological metabolic processes that contribute to plaque growth.
Methods:
We visualize the constitution of human carotid plaques by mid-infrared optoacoustic microscopy (MiROM), a method for label-free analytic histology that requires minimal tissue preparation, rapidly yielding large field-of-view en-face images with a resolution of a few micrometers. We imaged endarterectomy specimens (n = 3, 12 sections total) at specific vibrational modes, targeting carbohydrates, lipids and proteins. Additionally, we recorded spectra at selected tissue locations. We identified correlations in the variability in this high-dimensional data set using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF).
Results:
We visualized high-risk plaque features with molecular assignment. Consistent NMF components relate to different dominant tissue constituents, dominated by lipids, proteins, and cholesterol and carbohydrates respectively.
Conclusions:
These results introduce MiROM as an innovative, stain-free, analytic histology technology for the biochemical characterization of complex human vascular pathology.
