Biomedical Imaging Research Unit

Stanley Cardon
Department of Anatomy and Medical Imaging

‘Beauty of the Blood-Brain-Barrier’

The brain is a highly specialised organ and therefore requires an equally complex and specialised interface to the body's circulating bloodstream. The Blood-Brain barrier consists of a range of key brain cells that work in synchrony to maintain this highly restrictive interface, and here, with fluorescent labelling, we show the beautiful array of astrocytes, neurons, microglia and small blood vessels all around a central larger arteriole in human post-mortem brain tissue.

Instruments and software used:
Olympus VS200 slide scanner

Isha Ramanlal
Dept of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, FMHS

‘Tree of Life’

This video shows a rotating 3D reconstruction of the vascular network (red) within the villi (green) of an 11-week gestation human placental explant. The extensive, tree-like network of vessels facilitates efficient maternal-fetal exchange, thereby supporting fetal growth and highlighting the placenta’s vital role in sustaining early life.
3D imaging enables visualization of vessel organisation, connectivity, and spatial relationships; features that cannot be fully appreciated using traditional 2D histological sections.

Instrument: PhaseView Alpha3 Facility Edition light sheet microscope
Illumination: 4 μm-thick light sheet using 5× illumination objective
Detection objective: 4× (XLFLUOR4X/340; Olympus) Z-stack acquisition: Virtual optical sections at 2 μm intervals
Software: Imaris (3D reconstruction, rendering, and rotation

Shashika Chamod Munasingha
Pūhanga-koiora o Tāmaki Makaurau |
Auckland Bioengineering Institute (ABI)

‘Trapped octopus’

This beautiful sea creature is trapped among rocks — can it swim through the obstacles around it? This is an unidentified octopus-like structure in a human cardiomyocyte image. The octopus head represents a mitochondrion, and its arms could possibly be internal structures that have ruptured from the mitochondrion body.

Equipment - Tecnai G² Spirit Twin transmission electron microscope
Image processing methods -Blurring and colorization using Canva

Co Authors: Kenneth Tran, Toan Pham, Marie-Louise Ward, Vijay Rajagopal

Ally Choi
Department of Molecular Medicine and Pathology

‘Megakaryocytes in a synthetic 3D bone marrow niche’ 

Cytoskeletal rearrangement of mature megakaryocytes in a synthetic 3D bone marrow niche.

Cells were stained for alpha-tubulin (green) and F-actin (orange).

Microscope
The image was taken using confocal microscopy (Zeiss LSM800 Airyscan, 20x objective).