A toolkit for stroke infarct volume estimation in rodents
Rebecca Z. Weber,
Davide Bernardoni,
Nora H. Rentsch,
Beatriz Achón Buil,
Stefanie Halliday,
Mark-Aurel Augath,
Daniel Razansky,
Christian Tackenberg,
Ruslan Rust
Affiliations
Rebecca Z. Weber
Institute for Regenerative Medicine, University of Zurich, Schlieren 8952, Switzerland; Neuroscience Center Zurich, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Davide Bernardoni
Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Nora H. Rentsch
Institute for Regenerative Medicine, University of Zurich, Schlieren 8952, Switzerland; Neuroscience Center Zurich, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Beatriz Achón Buil
Institute for Regenerative Medicine, University of Zurich, Schlieren 8952, Switzerland; Neuroscience Center Zurich, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Stefanie Halliday
Institute for Regenerative Medicine, University of Zurich, Schlieren 8952, Switzerland
Mark-Aurel Augath
Institute for Biomedical Engineering and Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Zurich, Zurich 8052, Switzerland; Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich 8093, Switzerland
Daniel Razansky
Institute for Biomedical Engineering and Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Zurich, Zurich 8052, Switzerland; Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich 8093, Switzerland
Christian Tackenberg
Institute for Regenerative Medicine, University of Zurich, Schlieren 8952, Switzerland; Neuroscience Center Zurich, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Ruslan Rust
Institute for Regenerative Medicine, University of Zurich, Schlieren 8952, Switzerland; Neuroscience Center Zurich, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Department of Physiology and Neuroscience, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, United States; Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, 1501 San Pablo St., Los Angeles, CA 900893, United States; Corresponding author at: Institute for Regenerative Medicine, University of Zurich, Schlieren 8952, Switzerland.
Stroke volume is a key determinant of infarct severity and an important metric for evaluating treatments. However, accurate estimation of stroke volume can be challenging, due to the often confined 2-dimensional nature of available data. Here, we introduce a comprehensive semi-automated toolkit to reliably estimate stroke volumes based on (1) whole brains ex-vivo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and (2) brain sections that underwent immunofluorescence staining. We located and quantified infarct areas from MRI three days (acute) and 28 days (chronic) after photothrombotic stroke induction in whole mouse brains. MRI results were compared with measures obtained from immunofluorescent histologic sections of the same brains. We found that infarct volume determined by post-mortem MRI was highly correlated with a deviation of only 6.6 % (acute) and 4.9 % (chronic) to the measurements as determined in the histological brain sections indicating that both methods are capable of accurately assessing brain tissue damage (Pearson r > 0.9, p 0.8) between MRI-delineated regions of interest (ROIs) and ROIs obtained from histologic sections at four to six pre-defined landmarks, with histology-based delineation demonstrating higher inter-operator similarity compared to MR images. We further investigated stroke-related scarring and post-ischemic angiogenesis in cortical peri‑infarct regions and described a negative correlation between GFAP+fluorescence intensity and MRI-obtained lesion size.
