Abstract
Hierarchical Phase-Contract Tomography (HiP-CT) has been developed as an innovative way to study an intact human organ in 3D resolution on a near-microscopic scale. Within this project we want to leverage HiP-CT to investigate human lungs from patients with COPD and lung fibrosis. We aim to identify and quantify disease specific features and unravel the role of the vasculature in the pathophysiology of chronic lung diseases. HiP-CT will provide us with the advantage of comparing disease specific features across the entire organ (and thereby allow us to compare none vs mild vs severely affected tissue with the same lung) and quantify this in 3 dimensions which is not possible with any of the existing technologies. Using this highly detailed information we will segment and quantify the entire bronchial and vascular system and compare this in health and disease. We next want to leverage this knowledge to also obtain deeper biologic information by performing spatial analysis in the same organs using multiplex immunofluorescence and spatial transcriptomics. Lastly, we want to validate our findings in a larger collection of organs, as well as organs or biopsies with early disease from our own biorepository to validate the importance of our findings.
We are convinced that by combining state-of-the-art imaging technology with next generation biological tools, we will get one step closer in our understanding of chronic lung diseases which is desperately needed given their poor outcome.
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