English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

More children and adults under the age of 40 die of brain tumor than from anyother cancer. Brain surgery constitutes the first and decisive step for thetreatment of such tumors. It is extremely crucial to achieve complete tumorresection during surgery, however, this is a highly challenging task, as it isvery difficult to visually differentiate tumorous cells from the surroundinghealthy white matter. The nerve fiber bundles constitutive of the white matterare organized in such a way that they exhibit a certain degree of structuralanisotropy and birefringence. The birefringence exhibited by such alignedfibrous tissue is known to be extremely sensitive to small pathologicalalterations. Indeed, highly aligned anisotropic fibers exhibit higherbirefringence than structures with weaker alignment and anisotropy, such ascancerous tissue. In this study, we performed experiments on thick coronalslices of a healthy human brain to explore the possibility of (i) measuring,with a polarimetric microscope (employed in the backscattering geometry tofacilitate non-invasive diagnostics), the birefringence exhibited by the whitematter and (ii) relating the measured birefringence to the fiber orientationand the degree of alignment. This is done by analyzing the spatial distributionof the degree of polarization of the backscattered light and its variation withthe polarization state of the probing beam. We demonstrate that polarimetry canbe used to reliably distinguish between white and gray matter in the brain,which might help to intraoperatively delineate unstructured tumorous tissue andwell organized healthy brain tissue. In addition, we show that our technique isable to sensitively reconstruct the local mean nerve fiber orientation in thebrain, which can help to guide tumor resections by identifying vital nervefiber trajectories thereby improving the outcome of the brain surgery.

Polarimetric imaging of the human brain to determine the orientation and degree of alignment of nerve fiber bundles