Analysing the 3D structure of blood vessels using confocal microscopy

Greater understanding of the cellular arrangement in the vascular wall and receptor mediated cell-cell communication is crucial to the design of new drugs for treating cardiovascular disease. VASCAN 2000 is an EC funded partnership comprising vascular biologists, imaging scientists and software companies. In order to develop methods of studying vascular structure and function simultaneously in live tissue we are considering; (i) segmentation methods and morphometric analysis; (ii) point-spread function (PSF) measurement and deconvolution; (iii) non-biased counting; (iv) fast Fourier transform (FFT) analysis of 2D and 3D data; and (v) visualisation. Here we outline some of our progress to date