  High-resolution non-invasive 3D study of intact spine and spinal cord
morphology on the level of complex vascular and neuronal organization is a
crucial issue for the development of treatments for the injuries and
pathologies of central nervous system (CNS). X-ray phase contrast tomography
enables high quality 3D visualization in ex-vivo mouse model of both vascular
and neuronal network of the soft spinal cord tissue at the scale from
millimeters to hundreds of nanometers without any contrast agents and
sectioning. Until now, 3D high resolution visualization of spinal cord mostly
has been limited by imaging of organ extracted from vertebral column because
high absorbing boney tissue drastically reduces the morphological details of
soft tissue in image. However, the extremely destructive procedure of bones
removal leads to sample deterioration and, therefore, to the lack of
considerable part of information about the object. In this work we present the
data analysis procedure to get high resolution and high contrast 3D images of
intact mice spinal cord surrounded by vertebras, preserving all richness of
micro-details of the spinal cord inhabiting inside. Our results are the first
step forward to the difficult way toward the high- resolution investigation of
in-vivo model central nervous system.
