Whole-Brain Phase-Contrast Tomography in a primate model of Multiple Sclerosis

X-ray Phase Contrast Tomography (XPCT) recently emerged as a highly relevant imaging modality in preclinical neuroscience thanks to the exquisite contrast it allows for both white matter tracts and blood vessels. Imaging full brains is of major importance as neurological diseases are most often not restricted to delimited areas of infarction but affect neuronal or vascular networks well beyond from lesion cores. Until recently, the size of the field of view permitted by XPCT facilities only allowed the imaging of rodent brains. The recent development of Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography (HiP-CT) protocols on the ESRF beamlines BM05/BM18 enables to image intact monkey brains. We plan to perform a high-resolution 3D tractography of the white matter and segmentation of blood vessel architecture at the scale of the whole brain. Brains from animals responding differently to experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, a model for studying multiple sclerosis, will be compared.