An Approach for Precise Three-Dimensional Modeling of the Human Inner Ear

Abstract

For further morphological and physiological research, it is vital to establish precise three-dimensional models of the whole inner ear including the details of the membranous components. With the system of a projector and a high-resolution digital camera, 2 complete serial unstained celloidin sections of fresh human temporal bones were digitized as high-resolution images which were then sorted, calibrated, aligned and segmented using the 3D-Doctor software. Finally, 2 precise three-dimensional models of the inner ear were generated by simple surface rendering. The contours of tiny structures such as the crista ampullaris, the macula utriculi and the macula sacculi could be observed clearly. Our study suggests that it is technically feasible to employ complete serial unstained celloidin sections for precise three-dimensional reconstruction and that this helps reduce errors and laboratory workload. Moreover, the use of a high-resolution digital camera and the autoalignment function of 3D-Doctor further increase the accuracy of the models.

Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of C57BL/6 Mouse Inner Ear during Development

“…The most important one of them was how to align the position of structures in earlier and later pictures precisely. In previous studies, in order to match the contours of the inner ear in consecutive sections, the most common method has been to dig four small holes in the embryo before sections were made and using the four holes to match the sections [5] . But in our case this was not reasonable and we were unable to dig holes in the small-size embryos of the C57BL/6 mouse.…”

“…Previous studies have shown that using a variety of computerized image processing and reconstruction techniques can reconstruct an anatomically accurate 3-D computer model of the human temporal bone from serial histological sections [4,5] . But compared to the human temporal bone, the adult mouse temporal bone is much smaller and more difficult to reconstruct.…”

“…After positions were modulated using Photoshop 8.0 software with general histological boundaries but without artificial reference points, which were used by other authors on larger specimens, i.e. human cochlea 3-D reconstruction [5] , the boundaries of inner ear structures on each section were traced, aligned, colored and reconstructed into 3-D images using the function of simple surface rendering of the 3D-DOCTOR software.…”

Three-dimensional reconstruction of the pancreas and its surrounding structures

“…3D-Doctor and Amira software (USA) has been applied in medical fields, which has been proven to be stable, high-quality software for three-dimensional reconstruction [7,8].…”

A segmentation method to obtain a complete geometry model of the hearing organ

“…Despite its time consuming nature, many models have been obtained through manual segmentation (Voie and Spelman, 1995;Wada et al, 1998;Ghiz et al, 2001;Li et al, 2006;Lui et al, 2007;Hofman et al, 2009), some also use simple semi-automatic algorithms implemented in "Amira" (Visage Imaging GmbH), a popular 3D reconstruction software Meshik et al, 2009). Lee et al (2010) used not further specifiedmanual and semi-automatic algorithms implemented in another software "Avizo 6" (VSG SAS, Bordeaux, France) of the three scalae in the apical end of the guinea pig cochlea.…”