3D spectral imaging with synchrotron Fourier transform infrared spectro-microtomography

Abstract

We report Fourier transform infrared spectro-microtomography, a nondestructive three-dimensional imaging approach that reveals the distribution of distinctive chemical compositions throughout an intact biological or materials sample. The method combines mid-infrared absorption contrast with computed tomographic data acquisition and reconstruction to enhance chemical and morphological localization by determining a complete infrared spectrum for every voxel (millions of spectra determined per sample).

High-definition Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) Spectroscopic Imaging of Human Tissue Sections towards Improving Pathology

“…The kidney tissue example presented in this paper demonstrates the importance of higher spatial resolutions in order to extract biochemical information from glomerular structures (Figure 3 and Figure 5). In the future, new advances in Quantum Cascade Lasers as very bright IR light sources [54][55][56][57] , 3D spectral imaging 58 , and breakthroughs in the field of nanoscale IR technologies 52,53,59,60 hold exciting new avenues of research that may have huge implications in the future of tissue imaging.…”

Spectropathology for the next generation: Quo vadis?

“…45 Nevertheless, such models represent an exciting new development for in-vitro models which better mimic in-vivo conditions, and the emergence of IR tomographic image reconstruction using synchrotron sources to image these structures holds great promise. 46 The usefulness of Raman microspectroscopy 'optical sectioning' should also be emphasised. Whereas diagnostic applications rely largely on classification or regression algorithms, in-vitro applications can potentially exploit the full analytical capabilities of biospectroscopy.…”

3D FT-IR imaging spectroscopy of phase-separation in a poly(3-hydroxybutyrate)/poly( l -lactic acid) blend

“…Exploiting the rapid 2D spectral image acquisition capability of IRENI enables collection of a large number of transmission images as a sample is precisely rotated [24]. Thus, recording projection images as a function of sample angle corresponds to a tomographic data set.…”

“…All images were collected at one lateral position. For each wavelength, a full 3D representation of the sample can be reconstructed [24], and because we collect a full mid-IR spectrum for each data point, we can produce four-dimensional reconstructions: three spatial dimensions plus a spectral dimension. We therefore create a novel spectro-microtomography technique that provides not only the rich spectral information and chemical fingerprinting of FT-IR spectroscopy, but also the 3D distribution of those spectral signatures throughout the sample.…”