A simple and accurate method for 3-D measurements in microcorrosion casts illustrated with tumour vascularization

Microvascular corrosion casting is an established method to investigate vascular patterns of nearly all organs. Trying to evaluate these specimens quantitatively using native scanning electron microscope (SEM) pictures always implied a big error, because the information of depth cannot be taken into account. However, SEM stereo pairs allow for exact measurements. Tumour microcorrosion casts were used to demonstrate the feasibility of this 3-D quantification method. The information of depth was calculated for each measuring point using the parallax. From the resulting coordinates the intervascular distances, the interbranching distances as well as the interbranching angles were determined. We found significant differences between all investigated tumours. Reproducibility tests and tests for the greatest error possibilities resulted in a maximum deviation of 2.5% to be expected. Consequently this method is suitable for all application ranges of microvascular corrosion casting as a quantitative determination method.